Update this timeline entry

The Creek Confederacy was an amalgamation of recent tribes

Source: New Paths Beaten: Verner Crane's The Southern Frontier #564

Project ID

Chapter

Timeline title

Start date

End date

Filename received

Filename assigned

Content

And though [Verner] Crane was not trained as an ethnographer, his scholarship has had a lasting influence on anthropology, as he demonstrated the benefits of applying rigorous historical research methods to the anthropological study of the southeastern tribes. That Crane was interested in the anthropology can be seen in his contribution to a leading journal in that field, in which he sought to teach the anthropologists a thing or two about the historical method. Chief among Crane's targets of criticism was his contemporary John R. Swanton, an expert on southeastern Indians and among the leading anthropologists of that era. While Swanton pioneered the use of historical documents in his ethnographic works, his research methods were often less than meticulous and his reading of the historical record was colored by his profession's devotion to the "ethnographic present," a methodology that assumes tacitly the historical continuity of any given culture. 5 Crane, by way of contrast, assumed more explicitly the historical development of the southeastern tribes and utilized a broader spectrum of the documentary record at his disposal. By doing so, he was able to pinpoint precisely the emergence of the use of the term "Creek Indians," which came into use only in the early eighteenth century, leading Crane in The Southern Frontier to describe the Creek Confederacy as an "amalgamation of tribes" more recent in origin, perhaps, than Swanton had allowed.