Portobago And St. Giles Kussoe: A Comparison Of Two Trading Posts, One From Virginia And The Other From Carolina

Summary

Seventeenth-century trading posts in eastern North America were both places and symbols of settler expansion, spaces where violent encounters along with the exchange of goods co-existed as Europe pressed its case into the interior. In this paper, I compare assemblages recovered from two late 17th-century trading posts, including Portobago in Virginia and St. Giles Kussoe in Carolina, to tease out similarities and differences in the material conditions of these settlements. Both sites, for example, yielded higher proportions of Native-made ceramics than plantation settlements. The Native ceramics from Portobago, however, are all locally produced while a significant amount of non-local Native ceramics from St. Giles indicates foreign delegations to the settlement. These and other material differences reflect the varied strategies by which settlers, in search of animal skins, slaves, and land, manipulated Indigenous practices of exchange and warfare, and by which Indigenous leaders used Anglo-Native exchange to forge political alliances.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

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Contact(s): Nicole Haddow