Modeling Entradas, edited by Clay Mathers, is a volume full of rich and engaging case studies discussing sixteenth-century artifact assemblages, and researchers studying this period will certainly find this book to be full of insights and useful discussions. Despite the very interesting case studies, however, the volume delivers a little bit less than is promised in the title and introduction. Most notably, despite a subtitle that promises insight into sixteenth-century assemblages across North America, except for one excellent chapter devoted to the Francisco Vázquez de Coronado entrada (Chapter 2, by Mathers and Michael P. Marshall), the entire book is geographically quite narrowly focused on the southeastern United States.
Moreover, although Mathers argues in the introduction that a purpose of the volume is to provide models that “seek to bring anthropological analyses to the forefront in their approaches to entrada assemblages . . . [and] provide a new means of evaluating, comparing, and predicting patterning in the Early Historic archaeological record” (pp. 3–4), only about half of the chapters take this broad of an approach. Instead, the rest more narrowly interrogate material differences that can be used to distinguish specific entrada events.
Mathers and Marshall's chapter on the Tiguex Province in New Mexico (Chapter 2) is one of the few case studies in the book to use the language of model building explicitly, although several other chapters do provide intriguing analyses that will be broadly useful to researchers working in other contexts. For example, Christopher B. Rodning and colleagues (Chapter 7) use a detailed description of the material assemblage from the Berry site (Joara) in North Carolina to highlight distinctions between Spanish and early French and English trade assemblages as well as to identify how the signatures of domestic and military occupations contrast with other types of Spanish colonial assemblages.
Marvin T. Smith and David J. Hally (Chapter 9) also provide a rich, theoretically engaged discussion of the mechanisms of Native acquisition of European materials in entrada contexts. Their analysis, however, also illustrates the limitations of model building for understanding early colonial encounters. Specifically, after enumerating the ways in which European objects might have been acquired by Native peoples, they attempt to apply their model to understanding the large and diverse assemblage of sixteenth-century artifacts found at the Glass site (9TF145), a contact period site in Georgia that is probably associated with the Hernando de Soto expedition. They arrive at the somewhat unlikely conclusion that because the assemblage from this site does not well fit their models (of both material culture acquisition and of the Soto entrada route), it more likely reflects materials obtained by attack or by scavenging the failed—and distantly located—colony founded by Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón. James B. Legg and colleagues’ (Chapter 3) analysis of the metal objects recovered at the Stark Farm site in Mississippi also, and more explicitly, highlights some of the downsides to explicit model building by demonstrating the contingent and contextual way in which Native peoples engaged with European material culture.
Other chapters in the book are more tightly focused on specific research questions. Daniel M. Seinfeld and Munir Humayun (Chapter 5) present an elemental LA-ICP-MS analysis of seven-layer chevron beads—key index fossils of the sixteenth century—from sites hypothesized to be associated with the Soto entrada and other early colonial encounters. They suggest that beads from Soto sites might be distinguished by a specific recipe used in the manufacture of red glass. This argument is intriguing, but it would be more persuasive with a larger sample size and if the trace element data from their LA-ICP-MS analysis were discussed and reported.
Craig T. Sheldon and Ned J. Jenkins (Chapter 4) and Jenkins and Sheldon (Chapter 8) focus tightly on identifying the routes of the Hernando de Soto and Tristan de Luna entradas in Alabama and how material culture might be used to distinguish them. Although these chapters tread much the same ground and could likely have been condensed into a single chapter, both present a wealth of information on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century assemblages in Alabama. These chapters are, however, somewhat troubling because of their reliance on burial data provided by a deceased and anonymous collector, without any discussion of the ethical or legal context of these collections. Additionally, I think that some of their identifications of entrada assemblages are probably incorrect. For example, a number of contexts are identified as having likely Luna artifacts (e.g., Charlotte Thompson, Atasi), but many of the glass beads ascribed to this expedition (e.g., simple blue, Eye Beads) postdate this entrada based on well-established bead chronologies and comparison with the bead types recently excavated at the Luna settlement in Pensacola, Florida, as discussed by John E. Worth and John R. Bratten in Chapter 6.
Despite my quibbles, Modeling Entradas is an interesting and useful volume, and I highly recommend it, particularly to researchers engaged in the study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonial encounters in the US Southeast. It is a book I am sure that I will often consult.
