People, Trees, Rice: Consequential Intersections and Complicated Relationships in the Lowcountry

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Multiple dramatic changes in human-forest relationships are manifest in the landscape of the coastal region that spans southern North Carolina to northern Florida known as the Lowcountry. Ecologically diverse bottomland hardwood forests managed by Native Americans since at least the Woodland period were destroyed by settler-colonist newcomers who created a rice monoculture region nearly denuded of trees which was replaced after the Civil War by a mosaic of pine plantations, re-wilding relict rice fields, and residential and tourist construction. All of these landscapes are the result of cultural land-use practices. The managed landscapes that resulted from Native Americans applying generations of Indigenous Knowledge were illegible to European and European-American settler-colonists interested in the commodity value of trees for timber and naval stores, or who saw them as obstacles to lucrative plantation crops like indigo and rice. This latter group radically transformed the landscape through the forced labor of Captive Africans and Native Americans. Archaeological evidence from Laurel Hill, Brook Green, and neighboring rice plantations, geospatial data from historic maps and imagery, documentary and oral historical sources, and environmental data examined for this study help us to disentangle the complicated relationships of people and forests in this region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40426.0