... by Pat Winter

Vol. 11, No. 2. Winter 1992
Copyright © 1992 by the Southeastern Archaeological Conference

Reprinted from S0UTHEASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY
*Madoc. PAT WINTER. Bantam Books, New York, 1990. 587 pp., illus., biblio. $4.95 (paper).
*Madoc's Hundred. PAT WINTER. Bantam Books, New York, 1991. 451 pp., illus. $4.95 (paper).
Reviewed by Kit W. Wesler

There are persistent rumors from various quarters-- ranging from the lunatic fringe to sober collectors of folklore and legend-- that North America was not entirely beyond European contact in the last millennium that we call prehistoric. Once in a while, as in the excavations at L'Anse aux Meadows (Ingstad, The Norse Discovery of America, vol. 1: Excavations of a Norse Settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland. 1961-1968, Norwegian University Press, Oslo), the case for limited preColumbian contact becomes compelling. Even when archaeological confirmation of these stories is unavailable, they provide inspiration for writings that, though marketed and clearly labeled as fiction, nonetheless reflect the best of what archaeology attempts to do: bring the past to life and raise questions about the accuracy or completeness of our reconstructions.

Pat Winter's first two novels of the Madoc Saga take inspiration from the legend that a Welsh prince set sail to colonize North America in the twelfth century A.D.-the Medieval period in Britain and the Mississippian period in most of the Southeast. Whether such a voyage can be proven to have taken place is irrelevant to the novelist. How thoroughly and vividly the novelist can recreate the Middle Ages in North America is very relevant to us, reflecting both the state of our data and the effectiveness of our presentation of what we think we know.

The route of Winter's fictional Welsh colonists follows the Gulf coast of Florida and Alabama to the Tombigbee, up to Muscle Shoals, down the Tennessee to the confluence with the Ohio, and by the end of Madoc's Hundred, to Cahokia. Consider the Mississippian peoples whose territories this journey would cross or impinge upon, and then consider how well any one of us-- absorbed in sherd counts, hypothesis testing by statistical manipulations, or modelling of catchment areas-might be able to engage the aver-age member of "the public" and keep his or her attention for more than a thousand pages of very small print.

An archaeologist will find many points to quibble over, but the points are worth considering. If these wandering Welsh kept dropping iron along this route, why haven't we found it? Well, the campsites would be ephemeral, and iron would be in short supply and probably would rust to amorphous lumps in eight centuries. Then again, when we find a chunk of iron in the excavation of a Middle Mississippi house, what do we do but throw it out as a disturbance? Winter has thought about these problems and has created a scenario of archaeological near-invisibility that is in essence an exercise in methodology.

More grating to me is Winter's postulate that Cahokia owes much of its rise to an immigrant Mesoamerican elite. I spend a great deal of my time trying to disabuse my museum visitors of just such a notion, and to find it reinforced to a much bigger audience than I can reach is frustrating.

But are these questions necessarily the points we try hardest to present to non-archaeologists? We also try to convey simpler and subtler points, about how Mississippian peoples thought, behaved, cooked, ate. made tools, built houses, went about the daily tasks necessary to the life of any human being. We present these data most often in catalogues and through abstruse arguments on the significance of minutiae. A novelist must take these catalogues, add a liberal dose of imagination, and make the reader see a living village and meet plausible people.

Some of us who work on the front lines of public education in archaeology often wonder if we are really making any headway, or less pessimistically, whether there is a bigger audience out there than we are reaching. Novelists can reach that audience. Pat Winter represents our public in two senses: (1) her audience is interested in what we study, and thus our results; and (2) being a non-specialist, we can read her work to find out what a non-specialist has learned from what we produce and present.

I think that the Madoc series is the best fictional recreation of the late prehistoric Southeast that I have ever read. We may argue some details, cringe occasionally at fictional license, but we should learn from the successes and ponder the points of disagreement that these two novels embody. And if, suddenly, we spend a moment seeing a village rather than a pile of sherds, Winter has done us a favor as well.

* Reissued 2000 by The Authors Guild back-in-print.com/​AuthorHouse