Trend And Tradition in The Prehistory of The Eastern United States

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TREND AND TRADITION IN THE PREHISTORY OF THE EASTERN UNITED STATES (Illinois State Museum Scientific Papers Vol. X and American Anthropological Association Memoir 88), Joseph R. Caldwell, softcover, illustrated, 1958. BOOK CONDITION: near fine. The text block and illustrations are in near fine condition with no tears, marks, or dog-ears. There is no bookplate, but the signature of a prior owner is written inside the front cover and on the final free endpaper. This is not a library book nor a remainder. The wraps are in very good condition [minor wear at top of spine]. 9 ½ x 6 ¼, 88 pages, 8 ounces XX [From the introduction] IN PREHISTORIC North America, as in other parts of the world, we find over a course of some millennia and in the traces of thousands of small societies an archeological record of pervasive change in the details of material culture. From this we can infer more basic transformations. Thus, it can be proposed that the prehistory of the Eastern Woodlands shows a general shift from a wandering to a semi-settled kind of life, probably another shift from band to clan, and, further, to something like kingship on the one hand and to confederations of towns on the other. Along with these changes there occurred a cumulative increase in the amenities and comforts of life. On the face of it, this might seem a normal picture of historical development for any region of fairly hospitable environment. A closer look, however, suggested to the writer that the development of human cultures in Eastern North America was in part qualitatively different from whatever may be common to the configurations of growth in the nuclear civilizations of Mesoamerica and in the Old World (Steward 1955; Adams 1956a). Aside from the fact that the East was more a recipient than a donor of cultural innovation, we shall assert that if eastern prehistory is viewed as a succession of culture stages it is only the earlier of these which parallel the supposed stadial sequences in the areas where civilizations arose. Later eastern developments may be of a kind not shared with the nuclear regions. Although we also suggest that the later East was strongly affected by diffusions from Mesoamerica, the accommodation of these exotic elements into a developmental configuration of a distinctive type meant that eastern prehistory was much more than a dim reflection of events which took place in Mesoamerica. In maintaining that the East shows a different development from the nuclear civilizations of Mesoamerica and the Old World, we must also deny the validity, so far as this region is concerned, of a current culture-historical scheme (Willey and Phillips 1955) which subsumes the prehistory of the two American continents into a succession of configurational stages which are specifically appropriate to Mesoamerica and possibly to Peru. N° de ref. del artículo 002724

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