Archaeology in South Carolina

Description

The rich human history of South Carolina from its earliest days to the present

Adam King's Archaeology in South Carolina contains an overview of the fascinating archaeological research currently ongoing in the Palmetto state featuring essays by twenty scholars studying South Carolina's past through archaeological research. The scholarly contributions are enhanced by more than one hundred black and white and thirty-eight color images of some of the most important and interesting sites and artifacts found in the state.

South Carolina has an extraordinarily rich history encompassing the first human habitation of North America to the lives of people at the dawn of the modern era. King begins the anthology with the basic hows and whys of archeology and introduces readers to the current issues influencing the field of research. The contributors are all recognized experts from universities, state agencies, and private consulting firms, reflecting the diversity of people and institutions that engage in archaeology.

The volume begins with investigations of some of the earliest Paleo-Indian and Native American cultures that thrived in South Carolina, including work at the Topper Site along the Savannah River. Other essays explore the creation of early communities at the Stallings Island site, the emergence of large and complex Native American polities before the coming of Europeans,the impact of the coming of European settlers on Native American groups along the Savannah River, and the archaeology of the Yamassee, apeople whose history is tightly bound to the emerging European society.

The focus then shifts to Euro-Americans with an examination of a long-term project seeking to understand George Galphin's trading post established on the Savannah River in the eighteenth century. A discussion of Middleburg Plantation, one of the oldest plantation houses in the South Carolina lowcountry, is followed by a fascinating glimpse into how the city of Charleston and the lives of its inhabitants changed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Essays on underwater archaeological research cover several Civil War-era vessels located in Winyah Bay near Georgetown and Station Creek near Beaufort, as well as one of the most famous Civil War naval vessels—the H.L. Hunley.

The volume concludes with the recollections of a life spent in the field by South Carolina's preeminent historical archaeologist Stanley South, now retired from the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of South Carolina.

Sujets

• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Universidad Clemson
• Asedio de Charleston
• Carolina del Sur
• Fort Charlotte (South Carolina)
• Archaeology
• South Carolina Department of Natural Resources
• Charleston Museum
• Culture of the Southern United States
• Cultural geography
• Cooper River (South Carolina)
• Coastal Carolina University
• Ashley River (South Carolina)
• South Carolina Lowcountry
• New South
• South Carolina State Museum
• University of South Carolina
• Georgia Southern University
• Siege of Charleston
• College of Charleston
• State
• Slavery in the United States
• Clemson University
• South
• South Carolina
• History of the Americas
• Central
• Université de Clemson
• United States
• Université de Caroline du Sud
• FL
• Local
• KY
• LA
• TN
• MS
• SC
• NC
• Charleston
• AR
• VA
• GA
• Caroline du Sud

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 26 avril 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611176094
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Archaeology in South Carolina
Archaeology in South Carolina

Exploring the Hidden Heritage of the Palmetto State
EDITED BY
Adam King

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS
2016 Archaeological Research Trust of the South Carolina
Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
26 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN: 978-1-61117-608-7 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-1-61117-609-4 (ebook)
CONTENTS
LIST OF COLOR ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
The Search for the Earliest Humans in the Land Recently Called South Carolina
ALBERT C. GOODYEAR III
The Multicultural Genesis of Stallings Culture
KENNETH E. SASSAMAN
Foragers, Farmers, and Chiefs: The Woodland and Mississippian Periods in the Middle Savannah River Valley
ADAM KING AND KEITH STEPHENSON
Carolina s Southern Frontier: Edge of a New World Order
CHARLES R. COBB AND CHESTER B. DEPRATTER
The Yamasee Indians of Early Carolina
ALEX Y. SWEENEY AND ERIC C. POPLIN
George Galphin, Esquire: Forging Alliances, Framing a Future, and Fostering Freedom
TAMMY FOREHAND HERRON AND ROBERT MOON
Middleburg Plantation, Berkeley County, South Carolina
LELAND FERGUSON
Charleston: Archaeology of South Carolina s Colonial Capital
MARTHA A. ZIERDEN
The Submarine H. L. Hunley : Confederate Innovation and Southern Icon
STEVEN D. SMITH
Exploring the United States Naval Legacy in South Carolina
CHRISTOPHER F. AMER AND JAMES D. SPIREK
Archaeology and Public Education on the Great Pee Dee River: The Johannes Kolb Site
CARL STEEN, CHRISTOPHER JUDGE, AND SEAN TAYLOR
Archaeological Prospection: Near-Surface Geophysics
JONATHAN LEADER
Forty Years of Historical Archaeology in South Carolina at SCIAA: A Personal Perspective
STANLEY SOUTH
CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
COLOR ILLUSTRATIONS
Plate 1. Bend-break tools and blades from the Pleistocene terrace
Plate 2. Blades and unifaces from the Pleistocene sands
Plate 3. Clovis points from South Carolina
Plate 4. Red Stone points
Plate 5. Early Archaic points from South Carolina
Plate 6. Middle Archaic points from South Carolina
Plate 7. Late Archaic points from the Moody site
Plate 8. Early Woodland Mack points from South Carolina
Plate 9. Woodland points from Big Pine Tree site
Plate 10. Southern ovate and notched southern ovate bannerstones
Plate 11. Grooved axes
Plate 12. Late Archaic soapstone cooking stones
Plate 13. Stone celts
Plate 14. Portion of a Stallings fibertempered pot
Plate 15. Stallings fiber-tempered pottery with drag-and-jab punctuation designs
Plate 16. Middle Woodland herringbone-variant, linear-check-stamped jar
Plate 17. Mississippian-period plain bowl
Plate 18. Mississippian complicated stamped jar with cob-impressed neck
Plate 19. Plain Mississippian jar decorated with cane punctations and punctated nodes
Plate 20. Mississippian jar with a stamped design, cane punctations, and punctated nodes
Plate 21. Sixteenth-century Native American cooking jar
Plate 22. Spanish redware
Plate 23. Spanish 1 real silver coin of Phillip II
Plate 24. Spanish silver coin dated 1737
Plate 25. Eighteenth-century colonoware bowl
Plate 26. Eighteenth-century colonoware vessels
Plate 27. Chinese-export porcelain, 1770s
Plate 28. Artifacts from the Revolutionary War battlefield of Camden
Plate 30. Eighteenth-century English slipware chamber pot and cup
Plate 29. Brass candlestick buried in Francis Marion s 1780-1781 camp
Plate 31. English wine bottles in the SCIAA collection
Plate 32. Bottle seals marked G. A. Hall 1768
Plate 33. Charleston domestic slave tag
Plate 34. Alkaline glazed stoneware vessel made by the enslaved potter Dave
Plate 35. Union soldier s shoe from the north end of Folly Island
Plate 36. English hand-painted whiteware ceramics
Plate 37. Ceramics recovered near eighteenth-century Ninety Six
Plate 38. U.S. Marine Corps brass hat insignia from World War I
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
COMPLETING A BOOK SUCH AS THIS ONE requires the efforts of a great many people, and here I would like to thank them. The idea for the volume has been around for a very long time and has taken the continued efforts of many members of the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology s Archaeological Research Trust (ART) Board to bring it to fruition. Key among these is Russ Burns, who like others donated materially to this project and created the means by which ART has been able to offset the cost of the color images that appear in the volume.
Of course, the book would not have been possible without authors willing to contribute, some of whom received relatively short notice. I appreciate very much their hard work and patience and the confidence they placed in me to take their research and bring it to an audience. I also want to express my gratitude to James Legg, Sharon Pekrul, Tommy Charles, George Wingard, and Tammy Herron for playing a large part in creating and assembling the collection of images that appears in this volume. I especially appreciate that they each put other pressing matters aside to contribute.
I also wish to thank my employers, Steven D. Smith of the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology and Mark Brooks of the Savannah River Archaeological Research Program, for supporting my efforts. Without their continued support and prodding, this volume might never have seen the light of day. A special thanks must also go to Nena Rice Powell for keeping the idea of this book alive for so many years. Finally, credit must go to Thorne Compton for obtaining the original author commitments, because without his leadership and strong arm this volume still might be just an idea.
INTRODUCTION
IT HAS BEEN A LONG TIME since an entire book devoted to current research in South Carolina archaeology has been published. Honestly, this book has been a long time in the making, and the vision for what it was to look like has changed over the years. In this book the authors and I have tried to balance two important considerations. On the one hand, we wanted the book to stand up to scholarly scrutiny and be a resource for our colleagues to use. At the same time, we all realize that we need to communicate directly to the interested public what we do and what we have learned. After all, in one way or another, that public pays for most archaeology and certainly keeps the political will in the state positively predisposed to our shared past. This book is written to be accessible to nonarchaeologists while presenting information that is interesting and informative to both our research colleagues and those in our state who support us. That can be a tricky pair of objectives to meet. Some papers in this book are more technical than others, some are longer than others, and some are more easily accessible to nonspecialists than others. If we have done our jobs, all the essays should have something that everyone can gain from them.
This book is a collection of essays written by archaeologists currently doing research in the state of South Carolina. As such it is not written in one voice but, like the archaeology in South Carolina, has many voices and perspectives. This is an important aspect of archaeology for everyone to understand. Archaeology is not a unitary science: it has multiple ways of gathering data, and there are often multiple ways of interpreting the past. That makes perfect sense when you remember that we are ultimately studying people and their behavior in the past. The reasons why people do what they do are varied, complex, and often contradictory. Given the complexity and variability of what we study, it remains important to be as broad and flexible as we can as a profession.
In this book we have contributors from universities, state agencies, and private consulting companies. This is not uncommon and reflects the variety of entities that collect information about our past and interpret it. The essays discuss everything from the earliest people in the state to Native Americans at the dawn of European colonization to colonial Charleston and even some Civil War history. Archaeology is a way to collect information about the past, and lots of people use it as part of their study of the past-from anthropologists to historians to ecologists. In general, our intent is to capture the breadth of interests archaeologists pursue in the state. This is by no means an exhaustive showing, but it is fairly representative.
What Is Archaeology?
At its most fundamental level, archaeology is a set of methods designed to gather information about past behavior. Those methods range in scale from detailed excavations to the use of satellite imagery, and in technology from digging in the dirt with shovels to using nuclear physics to derive chemical compositions or estimate age. It is the great borrowing discipline, as it has and will always borrow methods of collecting and analyzing data as well as theory from other academic fields to understand the past.
In most of North America, archaeology is considered to be one of the four subfields of anthropology. One way (of many) to explain anthropology is to consider it the study of humankind as biological organisms and users of elaborate culture. In Europe archaeology is of