Description
War Paths, Peace Paths: An Archaeology of Cooperation and Conflict in Native Eastern North America is one of the titles from the Issues in Eastern Woodlands Archaeology Series from AltaMira Press. Author David Dye is associate professor of archaeology in the Department of Earth Sciences at University of Memphis. Archaeologists, ethnohistorians, osteologists, and cultural anthropologists have only recently begun to address seriously the issue of Native American war and peace in the eastern United States. New methods for identifying prehistoric cooperation and conflict in the archaeological record are now helping to advance knowledge of their existence and importance. Focusing on four major issues in prehistoric warfare studies settlement patterns, skeletal trauma, weaponry, and iconography the author presents a new interpretation of ancient war and peace east of the Mississippi. He considers evidence for raiding and more organized forms of warfare, accounts of Indigenous warfare witnessed by sixteenth-century Europeans, and the various causes of warfare, such as revenge, competition for resources, and ideology. The volume contains numerous maps, an extensive bibliography, and an index.