Our Faculty

ROBBIE ETHRIDGE
McMullan Associate Professor of Southern Studies
Associate Professor of Anthropology

Office hours:

Leavell 207

662-915-7317
rethridg@olemiss.edu

I received my Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 1996 and took a position at the University of Mississippi in Anthropology and Southern Studies the following year. My areas of expertise are historical anthropology and environmental anthropology, with an area focus on the Indians of the Southeastern United States. I have been interested in American Indians for most of my life, but I did not discover anthropology until my freshman undergraduate year. From that moment, I have been devoted to the study of American Indians and other indigenous people, and especially to the study of their colonial experiences. After receiving my B.S. and M.A. in anthropology, I worked as a field archeologist for many years. It was during this time that I began to understand the full importance of interdisciplinary work, and especially the need to combine archaeology, history, and anthropology in researching and writing histories of the American Indians.

As mentioned above, my primary area of interest is the ethnohistory of the Southeastern Indians. In particular, I am interested in the intersections between Native peoples and capitalist economics within the colonial context. In addition to several articles and chapters in books, I have co-edited two collections of essays (see below) and I wrote a monograph entitled Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World, which is a social, environmental, and economic history of the Creek Indians during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. My current research focuses on a region-wide study of the collapse of the pre-contact Mississippian chiefdoms following the European invasion and the reorganization of Native social groups in the ensuing decades. In particular, I am interested in the involvement of Southeastern Indian groups in the colonial commercial trade in Indian slaves, and I am using the Chickasaws as a case study of a group that early on opted to become trading partners with Europeans in the trafficking of Indian slaves.

Recent Publications:

  • Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians, University of Alabama Press, 2006.

  • Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World, University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

  • The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540-1760, co-edited with Charles Hudson, University Press of Mississippi, 2002.