Documenting Southeastern Indian Coalescence during the early Carolina Indian Trade

Summary

Past research has outlined the profound effects of the Carolina Indian deerskin and slave trade on the cultural landscape of the Southeast during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This work has identified a number of historical processes (e.g., population movements, disease, endemic violence, and economic transformation) stemming from the interaction of southeastern Indian and European Colonial worlds. Together, these processes forged a dynamic, even chaotic, landscape. In adapting to this new colonial landscape, many southeastern Indian groups employed social coalescence as a strategy to ameliorate population loss resulting from disease and slave raiding. In this paper, I compare the pottery assemblages from a number of contemporaneous Indian communities across the Southeast in order to explore how "improvised" communities were enacted by ethnically diverse remnant or refugee groups. I argue that patterns of diversity in these pottery assemblages reflect distinct potting traditions that can be used as material markers of this region-wide strategy of coalescence.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage