Heritage In Flux: Plantations, Palimpsests, and Clandestine Distillation

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Following the end of the Civil War, plantation landscapes in the South Carolina Lowcountry underwent dramatic changes that broke up massive, generational landholdings and upended centuries of exploitative economic systems. Moonshining provided a means for some former plantation owners to maintain possession of core properties, while providing a narrative of hardscrabble resilience that effaced the legacy of racial exploitation of their immediate pasts. Vacated plantation landscapes were likewise reimagined as historically vacant spaces, which aided in the creation of material and symbolic distance from racially charged pasts—a pattern that is broadly evident in revisionist Southern histories. This paper will consider the political economy of privilege that plantation owners-turned-moonshiners had while navigating these clandestine pursuits. Archival, spatial, and archaeological evidence will be used to explore the role of moonshining as means of mediating the rapidly changing Lowcountry landscape from a plantation economy to industrial timbering and railroad construction in the twentieth century.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37601.0