Exploring 'Whiteness' on Hatteras Island, NC, 1587-1710

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Hatteras island, on North Carolina Outer Banks is well known as the likely destination of the 1587 English Colonists when they abandoned their settlement on Roanoke island. Our archaeological investigations at the Cape Creek site since 2012 have located a sequence from the 16th-early18th c. which maps the integration of the English colonists into Algonquian society. We have observed shifts in diet, weaponry, material culture, architecture and dress. Using their unique status between English and Native American society, they became successful traders in deerskins, and visited by merchants from the Chesapeake. This society seems to have faded by the early 18th century, before the island was settled in c. 1720 by pioneer English colonists. The paper will explore the binary divide in the historical narrative, and argue that supremicist interprations have denied that the possibility of such a society surviving from the first English to have settled in North America.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow