Navigable Waterways as Plantation Landscapes

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Roads, Rivers, Rails and Trails (and more): The Archaeology of Linear Historic Properties" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Navigable waterways were essential to European colonization of the South Carolina Lowcountry beginning in the late 17th century. Despite early attempts by colonial leaders to keep land grants within close proximity to Charleston, colonists quickly began to establish plantations where the land was amenable for commodity production and scattered throughout the region. Consequently, waterways became integral not only to the functioning of the plantations themselves, but also as a means of transporting commodities to urban markets, facilitating communication between plantations and cities, and surveilling enslaved populations. Colonists and enslaved individuals utilized navigable waterways by extending the built environment into the water through wharves, landings, and watercraft. This paper investigates ways that the built environment of waterways can be integrated into plantation landscape studies as a means of understanding the movement of surveillance, communication, and production, focusing on the preliminary fieldwork of several antebellum Lowcountry plantation waterfronts as case studies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Roads, Rivers, Rails and Trails (and more): The Archaeology of Linear Historic Properties   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 229