Big Data and the Berry Site: Colonial Archaeology in the Carolina Foothills

Summary

This is an abstract from the "*SE Big Data and Bigger Questions: Papers in Honor of David G. Anderson" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

From December 1566 to March 1568, Captain Juan Pardo established a network of six small garrisons extending beyond the Atlantic Coast through modern-day North and South Carolina and across the Appalachian Mountains into eastern Tennessee. The first of these, Fort San Juan, was built in the Appalachian Foothills at a Native town named Joara and was intended to serve as the base of operations for Spain’s imperial designs in the interior of northern La Florida. The subsequent destruction of all six forts during an Indigenous uprising brought these imperial ambitions to an unexpected end. Although short-lived, Pardo’s forts constitute the earliest Spanish presidio system in the Western Hemisphere. More than two decades of archaeological research at the Berry site in North Carolina have revealed the location of Fort San Juan and the Indigenous context of its construction, use, and annihilation. Much of our work at Berry, and particularly our understanding of this Indigenous context, derives from Dave Anderson’s pathbreaking work on the Savannah River chiefdoms, and indeed, we suggest that the people of Joara were descended from the upper Savannah’s Late Mississippian populations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• *SE Big Data and Bigger Questions: Papers in Honor of David G. Anderson   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39740.0