Sixteenth-century Spanish explorers regarded Coosa as one of the most important chiefdoms in the southeastern United States. Using both documentary and archaeological evidence, we have located the main town of Coosa and several tributary towns, as well as some of the frontiers of the chiefdom. The locations of these towns and frontiers are supported by the archaeological recovery of sixteenth-century European artifacts in the postulated area of the chiefdom.

This book provides a new conceptual framework for understanding how the Indian nations of the early American South emerged from the ruins of a precolonial, Mississippian world. A broad regional synthesis that ranges over much of the Eastern Woodlands, its focus is on the Indians of the Carolina Piedmont - the Catawbas and their neighbors - from 1400 to 1725. Using an 'eventful' approach to social change, Robin Beck argues that the collapse of the Mississippian world was fundamentally a transformation of political economy, from one built on maize to one of guns, slaves and hides. The story takes us from first encounters through the rise of the Indian slave trade and the scourge of disease to the wars that shook the American South in the early 1700s. Yet the book's focus remains on the Catawbas, drawing on their experiences in a violent, unstable landscape to develop a comparative perspective on structural continuity and change.

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Recent research shows that a bacterial life form, Erysipelothrix insidiosa, can produce rheumatoid arthritis in deer, swine, and dogs, and that a number of animals, including man, birds, and fish, may be infected by the organism. Examination of the archaeological record suggests that both cultural and biological variables may be interrelated in the maintenance of some forms of arthritis over long periods of time in geographically disparate populations. Re-examination of Cherokee folk beliefs concerning arthritis suggests that they had some recognition of this connection, and it also suggests that they had some recognition of this connection, and it also suggests that the term "magical" may relate more to the world view of the observer than to any actual inability of preliterate peoples to draw causal relations on the basis of their own intimate knowledge of their environments.

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