A newly published volume of 12 essays 
by historians, anthropologists, and archeologists aims to decipher some perplexing historical mysteries: how and why did Indians of the 17th and 18th century South change after the European invasion?
The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540-1760 (University Press of Mississippi), coedited by Robbie Ethridge, McMullan Assistant Professor of Southern Studies and assistant professor of anthropology, examines and details two centuries for which very little is known about Southeastern Indians. 
“These two hundred or so years are practically unknown for the Southeast, yet this is a time in which dramatic changes happened to the Southeastern Indians,” said Ethridge, who has published and presented several papers on Southeastern Indians of the 18th century. “This book will not only contribute enormously to our understanding of Southeastern Indian history, but also to our understanding of early American history.”
Ethridge coedited the book with Charles Hudson, Franklin Professor of Anthropology at the University of Georgia, a leading expert on the anthropology and history of Southeastern Indians.
“This book is a remarkable example of scholarship,” said Jay Johnson, associate director of the University’s Archeology Research Center and a professor of anthropology. “It will stand as a landmark in the anthropology and ethnohistory of the region for many years to come.” 
Ethridge currently is working with Johnson on the Chickasaw Project—a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded joint academic venture with Mississippi State University—which is shedding new light into the internal workings of the late 17th to early 18th century Chickasaws and their relations with Northern Europeans and other Indian groups.
Ethridge said the book’s main purpose is to examine some of the historical forces at work when the Indians of the Southeast came into contact with the modern world system and to see how the native societies responded to these forces.
“Answering these questions requires us to write the social history of the South between about 1526 to about 1715 and to identify and examine the historical forces, trends, and events that were attendant to the formation of the Indians of the colonial South,” Ethridge said. “From these works, we now understand that the first 200 years of the historical era was a time when fundamental—even catastrophic—changes occurred in native societies of the South.”
The volume contains lectures presented at the University’s 1998 Porter L. Fortune Jr. History Symposium. Discussed were such topics as the introduction of Old World diseases, long- distance migration and dislocation, the influences of the Spanish mission system, the effects of the English plantation system, and the far-reaching shock waves generated by the northern fur trade of the English, French, and Dutch, and the English trade in Indian slaves and deerskins in the South.
In addition to Ethridge and Hudson, other contributors are Stephen Davis, Penelope Drooker, Patricia K. Galloway, Steven Hahn, Marvin Jeter, Paul Kelton, Timothy Pertulla, Christopher Rodning, Helen Rountree, Marvin T. Smith, and John Worth. 
Ethridge next year is set to publish another book, The Creek Indians and Their World, 1796-1816 (University of North Carolina Press).

Deidra Jackson