Environmental Attributes that Influence Transtemporal Settlement Patterning in the Historic Southeastern United States

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Environmental resources in the historical period in the southeastern United States were targeted differently than in any other preceding time period. While regional connections have been made between natural resource and historic settlement locations, few cross-cultural and cross-temporal synthesis exist. In this paper, we seek to articulate the major differences between settlements in coastal colonial and antebellum South Carolina, colonial and Gullah Geechee antebellum and postbellum Georgia, and tenant farming settlements in Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to explore the factors that determine the place of settlement and the relationship between people and their environment. Ultimately, we find that proximity to labor, proximity to resources that could be exploited on an industrial scale, and proximity to social networks to be the major contributing factors in small and mid-size post-colonial settlement strategies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53671