Visualizing Diaspora: Fort Ancient and Shawnee Migrations in Early America

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Soon after the De Soto Expedition (1539-1542), Fort Ancient peoples from the Middle Ohio Valley abandoned their summer villages. For twenty generations, village life in this region had been both egalitarian and stable. Through a close reading of archaeological sources, including laser ablation testing of late Fort Ancient ceramics, we now know much more about migration out of the Middle Ohio Valley. Reading these sources alongside archival data helps explain why this region became a vacant quarter in the proto-historic period. Thousands of people in diaspora abandoned their homelands and adopted altogether new approaches to economic and cultural survival. By 1755, British colonizers were astounded at the Shawnees’ capacity for travel and reinvention, labeling them "the greatest travelers in America." Through Community-Engaged Scholarship (CES), we created a database of Fort Ancient and Shawnee villages sites scattered across North America. In partnership with the Shawnee Tribe, we have tracked Shawnee migrations from the Fort Ancient Culture (+/- 1,000 A.D.) to 1871, the year of their forced removal from Kansas to modern-day Oklahoma. Close analysis of specific geographic and temporal contexts across this span of time reveals a general shift from entanglement to disentanglement well before the American Revolution.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23048