Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

<i>Daily Life in Pre-Columbian Native America</i> (review)

2009; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/aiq.0.0047

1534-1828

Joe Watkins,

Latin American history and culture

Reviewed by: Daily Life in Pre-Columbian Native America Joe Watkins Clarissa W. Confer . Daily Life in Pre-Columbian Native America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2008. 240 pp. Cloth $49.95, eBook $54.95. Clarissa Confer provides a well-written overview of the culture history and material culture of the American Indian groups who inhabited what is now the United States prior to the "discovery" of the New World by explorer Christopher Columbus in 1492. In her introduction the author recognizes that "archaeology is the key provider of most of the evidence on which our understanding is based" (x), but she also recognizes that the majority of the scientific work done in relation to the peopling of the New World is being conducted by non-Indians. She goes on to state that while the scientific explanation of the origins of humans in the New World is prevalent, "the cultural explanations of tribal people are just as 'real' to native people as scientific explanations are to non-natives" (xii). While this may seem trivial to some, it is an important reminder that there are multiple explanations of the past that are relevant and that it is not just the scientific story that has validity to American people. In addition to this caveat about the [End Page 282] primacy given to archaeology in the description of the pre-Columbian past, the author also discusses the conflict between written history and oral tradition. The book is divided into seven chapters, providing a generalized presentation of human life across the continent, beginning in the Northeast and proceeding generally east to west. There are some minor errors in the text, such as in the chronology, where it is stated that "Paleo-Indians live in Saugus, Massachusetts for the next 11, 000 years only to be destroyed by the Puritans in the seventeenth century" (xxiii). The term "Paleo-Indians" is an archaeological description of a culture that is commonly agreed to have ended approximately 8, 000 years ago. To equate the Native American groups encountered by the Puritans in the 1600s with Paleo-Indians is an overly broad generalization that is neither flattering to the local inhabitants nor archaeologically correct. Because of the broad topic under consideration and the author's desire to present the data in a less scientifically rigorous manner, the treatment of the information is generally broad as well. The chapters are well presented, but some information is compressed almost to the point of caricature—the lumping of the Midwest into the Northeast as a culture area is a case in point. While it may be simpler to present such an expanse in broad strokes, much of the cultural differences and similarities are lost in the condensation. Because of this, the text should not be considered an anthropological description of American Indian life across the continent prior to European contact; it is a better fit for late elementary to mid–high school readers, serving mainly as an appetizer for further reading and study. The treatment of the Southeast and the Southwest are two cases in point regarding the utility of the volume. While it is not intended as a major "study" on the topic of American Indian lifestyles in the pre-Columbian United States, the work has some errors that should be a consideration if used in elementary or high school classes. For example, in the discussion on Cahokia, the author justly notes it was probably the major city for the American continent but talks about the location covering only 5 acres; on the following page, however, the author talks about Monks Mound (a singular structure within Cahokia) covering more than 17 acres. The remainder of the discussion covers many of the broad topics of importance as an aid to understanding the culture history of the area prior to European contact. As such, it represents a good (albeit sparse) introduction to the region. The chapter on the Southwest produces some strong summaries of the cultures that occupied the desert regions of the Southwest, but it continues to use a term that has fallen out of common use among archaeologists—"Anasazi." More commonly, the term "Ancestral Puebloans" is used to describe the archaeological...