Early History of the Creek Indians and Their Neighbors

Early History of the Creek Indians and Their Neighbors. By John R. Swanton. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1922. Reprint, with an introduction by Jerald T. Milanich, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. 491 pp. $29.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8130-1635-5. Early History of the Creek Indians and Their Neighbors is, as Jerald T. Milanich writes in his introduction, a "classic." Published in 1922, the book describes the village clusters and nations that constituted the Greeks, as well as their neighboring tribes. Swanton's scholarship is impressive in both its breadth and detail; it is equally elegant in terms of its theoretical reasoning. The author's structural approach to the Greeks emphasizes clan divisions, gender divisions, and the moiety system that governed the affairs of war and peace. What is missing from his work is a sense of time. Swanton draws together disparate sources to assemble ethnographic "snapshots" that obscure important historical and cultural changes. Indeed, recent ethnohistorical and archaeological scholarship has revised Swanton's work and suggested that the South was a far more volatile place than he had ever imagined. In spite of the problems that run through the book, students of the native South need to read it because Swanton, more than any other individual, has set the terms of present-lay historical debates. The University Press of Florida is to be congratulated for making a hardto-find book accessible to the public. As an added bonus, the book includes ten maps that depict the Creeks at various times in their history.

JAMES TAYLOR CARSON, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario

Copyright University of Alabama Press Oct 2000
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