First Steps on a Long Corridor: The Gullah Geechee and the Formation of a Southern African American Landscape

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "First Steps on a Long Corridor: The Gullah Geechee and the Formation of a Southern African American Landscape," at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Gullah Geechee are a unique creole African American culture found on the sea islands and immediate coast of South Carolina and Georgia. Created from the context of rice, indigo, and sea island cotton plantations that required large Black labor forces working in relative isolation from whites, the Gullah Geechee are best known for their idiom, crafts, cuisine, and landscape. The Gullah Geechee have been recognized by the National Park Service through the creation of the Gullah Geechee Heritage Corridor, which threads along the South Atlantic Coast where the Gullah Geechee were prominent and where their communities remain. This session looks at the archaeology of the Gullah Geechee, their landscapes, cultural parallels, and public connections to the present generation to illustrate the ways in which this culture made a region their own.