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Book Review
| One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark. By Colin G. Calloway. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. xvii + 631 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95; £30.50.)
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Colin Calloway's history of the American West from the Appalachians to the Pacific examines how the West has been shaped by many peoples' histories from 15,000 BP to 1800 CE. In Part I, "The West Before 1500," Calloway synthesizes archaeological research on the Great Plains, Pacific Coast, Southwest, and Mississippi Valley and makes it accessible to non-specialists. The first pioneers were men and women who hunted and gathered food on the grasslands and, over time, developed sophisticated technologies and expert knowledge of animal behavior and vegetation. At least 7,000 years ago, human societies on the Pacific Coast developed specialized fishing, hunting, and gathering techniques. Beginning about 1,500 years ago, after corn was introduced from Mexico and adapted to different ecological conditions, reliance on farming in the Southwest (later, in the Mississippi Valley and Prairie Plains) changed human relations with the environment and reordered social relationships. Men and women developed new technologies, ideologies, and rituals. Trade networks linked the farming and hunter-gatherer peoples west and east of the Appalachians. For centuries, through cycles of boom and bust, groups dispersed and amalgamated, and boundaries of identity were "fluid and flexible, not firm and fixed" (p. 54). |
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