19th-Century Rice Agriculture and the Bronson Strip Site, St. Catherines Island, Georgia, USA

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Bronson Strip site (9Li163), located on the Holocene dune ridges of St. Catherines Island, a barrier island on the Georgia coast (USA), is a multicomponent site that includes substantial evidence for earthworks (e.g., dams and ditches) associated with tidewater, plantation-era (ca. 1790-1820), rice agriculture. While most plantation-era sites on St. Catherines Island are associated with the Pleistocene-core of the island and Sea Island cotton agriculture, the Bronson Strip site provides the best evidence on the island for the complex use of even “marginal” portions of the coastal landscape. In this paper we present new archaeological and geophysical (magnetic gradiometry and electrical resistance) data to explore the role of rice agriculture in the early 19th century plantation landscape of the island and contextualize the lived experiences of the enslaved Africans laboring at this site.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SHA 2023 General Sessions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow