With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Charles Cobb will conduct archaeological research on colonial-era Native American towns along the Savannah River in South Carolina and Georgia, USA. His team will focus on indigenous migration to the Savannah drainage (which became part of the southern frontier of the Carolina colony in the late 1600s) and resulting patterns of material hybridity as Native groups began to incorporate and modify European practices and material culture. The establishment of Charleston in AD 1670 spawned a massive wave of Native American population movement, as groups attempted to physically situate themselves to take advantage of highly lucrative trade partnerships with the English. This movement led to a string of settlements along the Savannah River south of Charleston, where large numbers of deerskins were bartered to English traders in exchange for a wide range of European goods. An important dimension of the migration was the variety of Native American homelands involved. Towns along the Savannah River were founded by the Chickasaw from Mississippi, Creek groups from Alabama and Georgia, and the Yuchi from Tennessee, to name just a few. In addition, English trading outposts grew alongside these towns. As a result, the Savannah River region evolved into a frontier characterized by considerable ethnic diversity, and in many respects was a staging ground for the melting-pot metaphor we associate with the United States today.
The research will involve two seasons of archaeological fieldwork at a town occupied by Apalachicola Native Americans who migrated from southern Georgia; field survey to identify additional towns along the Savannah River; and re-analyses of collections made from earlier excavations at two towns. Ethnohistorical research will complement the archaeological investigations as Cobb and his collaborators will use colonial documents and maps to identify town locations and reconstruct European descriptions of Native American lifeways in those towns. The research questions are directed at evaluating (1) the ecological and subsistence adjustments involved in the uprooting from one location to another as groups migrated to the Carolina frontier, and (2) how Native Americans selectively incorporated elements of European material culture and practices into their cultures.
The project's intellectual merit is based on its examination of how migration into frontiers led to the formation of hybridized patterns of material culture as groups learned to accommodate to very distinct worldviews from their own. Traditional views of the North American frontier have construed it as a wave of advance, where indigenous migration consisted of a retreat from European colonial settlements. The Savannah Valley Frontier Project promotes a more nuanced view of these processes that is in line with current anthropological theory, where indigenous groups contributed to the formation of borderlands through migrations and activities strongly shaped by their own volition.
The broader impacts of the study build on the considerable history of the archaeology of colonialism that has been conducted at the University of South Carolina. The research will actively integrate undergraduate participation and outreach to Native American communities through an archaeological field school operated through the USC Lancaster Native American Studies Program. Graduate students will be directly involved as graduate research assistants, and they and other graduate and undergraduate students will be encouraged to adopt aspects of the project for thesis and dissertation research.
