On a hot summer night in the mid-fourteenth-century Southeast, a chief prepares for a raid on his enemies. The forest is quiet and still as his warriors solemnly approach their fortified capital at the lake’s edge. The Sacred Warrior, the priestly leader of the war party, and his war commanders assemble in the great plaza or square ground that lies between the chief’s mound at one end and the temple that holds the remains and treasures of the chief’s ancestors at the other. With arrows nocked …