Networking Households, Building a Nation: Investigating the Social Organization of Eighteenth-Century Yamasee Towns in South Carolina

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Applications of Network Analysis" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The application of social network analysis to archaeological research in the US Southeast has largely focused on interregional mobility and exchange. In this paper, I instead explore how small-scale social networks maintained by households shape larger-scale community structures. For several millennia in the US Southeast, households were the domain of women and the dominant institution for organizing social relations in Indigenous communities. Households were also places where new and old cultural traditions were mediated during the colonial period. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the volatility of the Indian slave and fur trades led to the emergence of several powerful multiethnic Native nations. This includes the Yamasee, a community of ancestrally diverse people who migrated to and built a nation in the Port Royal Sound of South Carolina at the turn of the eighteenth century. Herein, I compare practices of household ceramic production, focusing on raw clay processing, paste recipes, and macro-stylistic traits, from domestic contexts at six Yamasee towns to map the nodes, ties, and strength of social networks that connected Yamasee households through kinship and social learning. These multiscalar networks facilitated this period of Yamasee nation-building, ultimately culminating in 1715 with the Yamasee War against the Carolina colony.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeological Applications of Network Analysis   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38559.0