Of Pirates and Pilots: The Impact of Climate on Illicit and Survival Behaviour on the Fringes of Global Society

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Frontier and Settlement Archaeology" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Relationships between people and landscapes can be used to inform upon social and behavioural variations. Hurricanes and shifting climactic dynamics around Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks NC directly affected this relationship. Historically, Ocracoke provided vital trade and communication links from the West Indies to North America. Pilot Town, on Ocracoke island, was so-named for ships’ pilots who guided ships safely through treacherous, moving inlets and sand-banks. Outer-Bankers based their survival on developing intimate knowledge/relationships of their environment and climate. Ocracoke provides an extreme example of developing isolation, making it a useful case study to examine reactions, relationships and developmental attitudes. This study combines island and hurricane mapping to examine social communication and isolation models to highlight acclimatisation within local environments, and test how changing climactic-environmental factors affected social structure hypothesising that the local landscapes, both static and shifting, affected human interactions and lifeways.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2019   •
• Frontier and Settlement Archaeology

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 154