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People have long been fascinated about times in human history when different cultures and societies first came into contact with each other, how they reacted to that contact, and why it sometimes occurred peacefully and at other times was violent or catastrophic. Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology, edited by James G. Cusick,seeks to define the role of culture contact in human history, to identify issues in the study of culture contact in archaeology, and to provide a critical overview of the major theoretical approaches to the study of culture and contact. In this collection of essays, anthropologists and archaeologists working in Europe and the Americas consider three forms of culture contact—colonization, cultural entanglement, and symmetrical exchange. Part I provides a critical overview of  theoretical approaches to the study of culture contact, offering assessments of older concepts in anthropology, such as acculturation, as well as more recently formed concepts, including world systems and center-periphery models of contact. Part II contains eleven case studies of specific contact situations and their relationships to the archaeological record, with times and places as varied as pre- and post-Hispanic Mexico, Iron Age France, Jamaican sugar plantations, European provinces in the Roman Empire, and the missions of Spanish Florida. Studies in Culture Contact provides an extensive review of the history of culture contact in anthropological studies and develops a broad framework for studying culture contact’s role, moving beyond a simple formulation of contact and change to a more complex understanding of the amalgam of change and continuity in contact situations.

A model of borderland culture is provided and the concept of creolization is placed within a borderland framework. Manipulation of social identities and affiliations is a daily occurrence in border areas and \"creolization\" can be seen as one possible outcome of such manipulation. Presentation includes: a definition for borderland and how it differs from a frontier, a discussion of why creolization should be treated as a part of culture contact studies, and examples of negotiated culture on the border with emphasis on the Minorcans of Spanish Florida. The final argument is that creole cultures are one variant of the many kinds of fluid, syncretic cultures that typically appear in border areas.

The colonial inhabitants of these two areas lived in tense juxtaposition with their American neighbors, in part because the frontier areas provided Indian tribes with autonomy and land rights that impeded U.S. expansion; and in part because enslaved people had a chance at liberty if they could get across the international border. Besides this, both areas were hard-pressed to fill the ranks of their militia forces, creating opportunities for free blacks or fugitives from slavery to enlist. With personal stories drawn from memoirs, military correspondence, and other sources, Smith outlines the decisions confronting people of color in all the theaters of the War of 1812: service in the British or American navies, flight from the war zone, recruitment into the army, alliance with Native Americans.