The definitive archaeological record and what is known or speculated about the ancient Apalachicola and lower Chattahoochee Valley region of northwest Florida, southeast Alabama, and southwest Georgia

In this meticulously researched volume, Nancy Marie White provides a major holistic synthesis of the archaeological record and what is known or surmised about the peoples of the Apalachicola and lower Chattahoochee Valley region of northwest Florida, southeast Alabama, and southwest Georgia. White transforms a neglected research area into a lively saga that spans the time of the first human settlement, around 14,000 years ago, through the Middle Woodland period, ending about AD 700.

White reveals that Paleoindian habitation was more extensive than once surmised. Archaic sites were widespread, and those societies persisted when the Ice Age ended 10,000 years ago. Pottery appeared in the Late Archaic period (before 4000 BP), and Early Woodland–period burial mounds demonstrate a flowering of religious and ritual systems. Middle Woodland societies expanded this mortuary ceremony, and the complex pottery of the Swift Creek and the early Weeden Island ceramic series show an increased fascination with the ornate and unusual. Yet, basic Native American lifeways continued with gathering-fishing-hunting subsistence traditions similar to those of their ancestors.

This volume and its companion form the definitive work on the Apalachicola–lower Chattahoochee Valley region for both scholars and general readers interested in Native Americans of the Southeast.

Nancy Marie White is professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida. She is author of Archaeology for Dummies, editor of Gulf Coast Archaeology: The Southeastern United States and Mexico, and coeditor of Grit-Tempered: Early Women Archaeologists in the Southeastern United States.

“White writes lovely prose and her passion for archaeology and the region in which she works really engages readers. . . . White brings in many ethnographic analogies, which humanize the archaeology and remind readers that archaeology is anthropology.”
—Mary Glowacki, coeditor of The Wari Civilization and Their Descendants: Imperial Transformation in Pre-Inca Cuzco