Animals and Animality in Eastern Woodland Societies

Name: Animals and Animality in Eastern Woodland Societies
Author: Jessica A. Jenkins
ISBN: 9781683406587

Edited by Jessica A. Jenkins and Neill J. Wallis

Published by: University of Florida Press

Series: Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series

Drawing on archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic sources, this book highlights the significance of animals in what is now the US Southeast across thousands of years, exploring how humans and animals interacted to shape social, ritual, and cosmological worlds.

248 Pages6.00 × 9.0037 b/w illus., table, notes, bibliography, index

Hardcover
9781683406587
Published: August 25, 2026

$90.00

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EPUB
9781683406006
Published: August 25, 2026

(Ebook delivery via Leaf eReader app.)

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Description
Authors
Praise
Table of Contents

Exploring how humans and animals in the US Southeast interacted to shape social, ritual, and cosmological worlds across thousands of years

Archaeologists often approach the study of animals mainly as evidence of human diet or ecology, but this volume highlights the broader significance of animals across what is now the US Southeast from the Woodland period through the post-contact era. Drawing on archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic sources, contributors examine how animals shaped human identities, rituals, and social structures as seen in art, oral traditions, daily practices, and ceremonial roles.

In this volume, case studies reveal diverse expressions of human–animal relationships—in Mississippian ceramics, shell reef symbolism, deer antlers used in Powhatan rituals, the protective burial of chickens by enslaved communities, and more. These examples challenge rigid boundaries between human and nonhuman and move beyond traditional Western binaries that position animals as less than humans. This volume engages with non-Western and Indigenous-informed perspectives that recognize animals as cosmologically, politically, and socially significant beings. It explores animality as a dynamic, relational category and contributes to wider debates on materiality, agency, and ontology in archaeology.

Jessica A. Jenkins, assistant professor of anthropology at Clemson University, is the author of An Archaeology of Woodland Transformation: Social Movements, Identities, and Pottery Production on the Gulf Coast. Neill J. Wallis, curator in archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, is coeditor of New Histories of Pre-Columbian Florida.

“Jenkins, Wallis, and their coauthors look beyond subsistence to consider social interactions between humans and nonhuman species, especially those animals treated as other-than-human persons with agency. I hope this new book persuades others to take up the relational perspectivist challenge.”—Gregory A. Waselkov, coeditor of Bears: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Perspectives in Native Eastern North America

List of Illustrations

Chapter 1. Defining Animality in Eastern Woodland Contexts
Jessica A. Jenkins and Neill J. Wallis

Part 1. Animals in Eastern Woodland Art and Iconography

Chapter 2. Birds of a Feather? Animals and Early Villages of the Woodland Period (1000 BCE–1050 CE) on the Gulf Coast of Florida
Thomas J. Pluckhahn

Chapter 3. Human and Animal Intersubjectivity in Woodland Period Art of Florida and the Deep South
Neill J. Wallis

Chapter 4. Middle Woodland Communities’ Classification of Animals: A Perspective Based on Hopewell Effigy Platform Pipes
Bretton T. Giles

Part 2. Shells and Shellfish Beyond Subsistence

Chapter 5. Shells and Their Death/New Life Symbolism in Eastern North American Cultures
Cheryl Claassen

Chapter 6. The Worlds Are Your Oyster
Jessica A. Jenkins

Part 3. Animality, Ritual Specialists, and Embodiment

Chapter 7. The Spirit of Becoming and the Power to Change: Deer Antlers in the Native Chesapeake
Martin Gallivan and John Henshaw

Chapter 8. Examining the Roles of Ritual Specialists in the Lower Mississippi Valley During the Late Woodland Period Through Animal and Plant Remains
Ashley Peles, Megan C. Kassabaum, and Vincas P. Steponaitis

Part 4. Animals and Enslavement in Historical Contexts

Chapter 9. When Animals Speak: Evidence of Animality from the Prospect Hill Plantation in Jefferson County, Mississippi
Shawn P. Lambert

List of Contributors

Index