Abstract
Settlers along the 18th-century South Carolina frontier practiced a diversified economy in which material goods were often manufactured in the home or acquired from local crafters. The knowledge required for homesteading was derived from folk traditions. Archaeological information related to architecture, foodways, and textile manufacture illustrates the importance of folkways at the Howell site, a frontier plantation. Recovered information demonstrates the backcountry was characterized by cultural exchange between European, African, and Native Americans. The following article proposes that multicultural exchange resulted in the syncretism of foodways and textile traditions at the study site.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abernethy, Thomas P. 1957 The Southern Frontier, An Interpretation. In The Frontier in Perspective, edited by Walker D. Wyman and Clifton B. Kroeber, pp. 129–142. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.
Adams, Natalie P. 1990 Early African-American Domestic Architecture from Berkeley County, South Carolina. Unpublished M.A. thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of South Carolina, Columbia.
Anderson, Enid 1987 The Spinner’s Encyclopedia. Sterling, New York.
Babson, David W. 1990 The Archaeology of Racism and Ethnicity on Southern Plantations. Historical Archaeology 24(4):20–28.
Berkhoffer, Robert F., Jr. 1981 The North American Frontier as Process and Context. In The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared, edited by Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson, pp. 43–75. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut.
Blassingame John W. 1979 The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. Oxford University Press, New York.
Bolsterli Margaret Jones 1982 The Very Food We Eat: A Speculation of the Nature of Southern Culture. Southern Humanities Review 16:119–127.
Braithwaite, Edward Kamau 1971 The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica: 1770–1820. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Bridenbaugh, Carl 1952 Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge.
Brown, Richard M. 1963 The South Carolina Regulators. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Cabak, Melanie A. 1990 Searching for the Meaning of Blue Beads to Afro-American Slaves. Manuscript on file with the author, South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina, Columbia.
Campbell, Edward D., and Kym S. Rice (editors) 1991 Before Freedom Came: African American Life in the Antebellum South. Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, and University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville.
Carson, Cary, Norman F. Barka, William M. Kelso, Garry Wheeler Stone, and Dell Upton 1988 Impermanent Architecture in the Southern American Colonies. In Material Life in America: 1600–1860, edited by Robert Blair St. George, pp. 113–158. Northeastern University Press, Boston, Massachusetts.
Chapelot, Jean, and Robert Fossier 1985 The Village and House in the Middle Ages. B. T. Batsford, London.
Connah Graham 1975 The Archaeology of Benin: Excavations and Other Researches in and Around Benin City, Nigeria. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Deagan Kathleen 1983 Spanish St. Augustine: The Archaeology of a Colonial Creole Community. Academic Press, New York.
Deetz, James 1977 In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life. Anchor/Doubleday, New York.
1988a American Historical Archaeology: Methods and Results. Science 239:362–367.
1988b Material Culture and Worldview in Colonial Anglo-America. In The Recovery of Meaning: Historical Archaeology in the Eastern United States, edited by Mark P. Leone and Parker B. Potter, Jr., pp. 219–233. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C.
Dixon, Philip 1976 Barbarian Europe. E. P. Dutton, New York.
Drucker, Lesley, and Ronald Anthony 1979 The Spiers Landing Site: Archaeological Investigations in Berkeley County, South Carolina. Carolina Archaeological Services, Columbia, South Carolina.
Earle, Alice Morse 1926 Home Life in Colonial Days. Macmillan, New York.
Ewen Charles R. 1991 From Spaniard to Creole: The Archaeology of Cultural Formation at Puerto Real, Haiti. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.
Ferguson, Leland G. 1980 Looking for the “Afro” in Colono-Indian Pottery. In Archaeological Perspectives on Ethnicity in America: Afro-American and Asian American Culture History, edited by Robert L. Schuyler, pp. 14–28. Baywood, Farmingdale, New York.
1990 Lowcountry Plantations, the Catawba Nation and River Burnished Pottery. In Studies in South Carolina Archaeology: Essays in Honor of R. S. Stephenson, edited by Albert C. Goodyear III and Glen T. Hanson. Anthropological Studies 8:185–191. South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, Columbia.
1991 Struggling with Pots in Colonial South Carolina. In The Archaeology of Inequality, edited by Randall H. McGuire and Robert Paynter, pp. 28–39. Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
1992 Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650–1800. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C.
Fischer, David H. 1989 Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Oxford University Press, New York.
Fisher, Angela 1984 Africa Adorned. Harry N. Abrams, New York.
Forman, Henry C. 1948 The Architecture of the Old South: The Medieval Style, 1585–1850. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Garrett, Elisabeth D. 1990 At Home: The American Family, 1750–1870. Harry N. Abrams, New York.
Genovese, Eugene D. 1974 Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. Pantheon Books, New York.
Glassie, Henry 1975 Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville.
Gray, Lewis C. 1933 History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860. Carnegie Institution, Washington, D.C.
Green, Edwin L. 1932 A History of Richland County, South Carolina. R. L. Bryan, Columbia, South Carolina.
Gregg, Alexander 1905 History of the Old Cheraws. State Company, Columbia, South Carolina.
Groover, Mark D. 1992 Of Mindset and Material Culture: An Archaeological View of Continuity and Change in the 18th Century South Carolina Backcountry. Volumes in Historical Archaeology 20. Conference on Historic Site Archaeology, University of South Carolina, Columbia.
Hallowell, Irving A. 1957 The Backwash of the Frontier: The Impact of the Indian on American Culture. In The Frontier in Perspective, edited by Walker D. Wyman and Clifton B. Kroeber, pp. 229–258. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.
Harris, Jessica B. 1989 Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons: Africa’s Gifts to New World Cooking. Atheneum, New York.
Herskovits, Melville J. 1941 The Myth of the Negro Past. Harper, New York.
1966 The New World Negro: Selected Papers in Afroamerican Studies. Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
Holmes, William H. 1903 Aboriginal Pottery of the Eastern United States. Twentieth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology: 1–237. John Wesley Powell, principal author. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C.
Jennings, Francis 1975 The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.
Jordan, Terry G., and Matti Kaufs 1989 The American Backwoods Frontier: An Ethnic and Ecological Interpretation. John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland.
Joyner Charles 1984 Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community. University of Illinois Press, Chicago.
1991 The World of the Plantation Slaves. In Before Freedom Came: African American Life in the Antebellum South, edited by Edward D. Campbell, Jr., and Kym S. Rice, pp. 51–99. Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, and University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville.
Kelso, William M. 1984 Kingsmill Plantations, 1619–1800: Archaeology of Country Life in Virginia. Academic Press, New York.
Klein, Rachel N. 1979 The Rise of the Planters in the South Carolina Backcountry. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, Yale University, New Haven. University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
1990 Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.
Kniffen, Fred 1965 Folk Housing: Key to Diffusion. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 55(4):549–577.
Knight, Franklin W., and Margaret E. Crahan 1979 The African Migration and the Origins of an Afro-American Society and Culture. In Africa and the Caribbean: The Legacies of a Link, edited by Margaret E. Crahan and Franklin W. Knight, pp. 1–19. John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland.
Kovacik Charles F., and John J. Winberry 1987 South Carolina: A Geography. Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado.
Lees, William B., and Kathryn M. Kimery-Lees 1979 The Function of Colono-Indian Ceramics: Insights from Limerick Plantation, South Carolina. Historical Archaeology 13:1–13.
Lewis, Kenneth E. 1984 The American Frontier: An Archaeological Study of Settlement Pattern and Process. Academic Press, New York.
Lewis, Kenneth E., and Donald L. Hardesty 1979 Middleton Place: Initial Archaeological Investigations at an Ashley River Rice Plantation. Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, Research Manuscript Series 148. University of South Carolina, Columbia.
Leyburn, James G. 1935 Frontier Folkways. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut.
Little, Frances 1931 Early American Textiles. Century, New York.
Main, Gloria L. 1982 Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650–1720. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.
Martin, Ann Smart 1989 The Role of Pewter as Missing Artifact: Consumer Attitudes Toward Tablewares in Late 18th Century Virginia. Historical Archaeology 23(2): 1–27.
McDaniel George W. 1982 Hearth and Home: Preserving a People’s Culture. Temple University Press, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
McDonald, Forrest 1989 Cultural Continuity and the Shaping of the American South. In Geographic Perspectives in History, edited by Eugene D. Genovese and Leonard Hochberg, pp. 215–234. Basil Blackwell, New York.
Meinig, D. W. 1989 A Geographical Transect of the Atlantic World, ca. 1750. In Geographic Perspectives in History, edited by Eugene D. Genovese and Leonard Hochberg, pp. 185–204. Basil Blackwell, New York.
Meriwether, Robert L. 1940 The Expansion of South Carolina, 1729–1765. Southern Publishers, Kingsport, Tennessee.
Merrell, Robert L. 1989 The Indian’s New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.
Michie James L. 1989 The Discovery of Old Fort Congaree. Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, Research Manuscript Series 208. University of South Carolina, Columbia.
Mintz Sidney W., and Richard Price 1976 An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective. Institute for the Study of Human Issues, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Morrison, Alexander 1985 A New Way of Looking at Old Holes: Methods for Excavating and Interpreting Timber Structures. In Structure and Process in Southeastern Archaeology, edited by Roy S. Dickens, Jr., and H. Trawick Ward, pp. 119–134. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.
Morrison, Hugh 1952 Early American Architecture. Oxford University Press, New York.
Nairne, Thomas 1988 A Letter from South Carolina. In Selling a New World: Two Colonial South Carolina Promotional Pamphlets, edited by Jack P. Greene, pp. 35–73. University of South Carolina Press, Columbia.
Nash, Gary B. 1974 Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.
Neiman, Fraser D. 1986 Domestic Architecture at the Cliffs Plantation: The Social Context of Early Virginia Building. In Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture, edited by Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach, pp. 292–314. University of Georgia Press, Athens.
Noël Hume, Ivor 1982 Martin’s Hundred. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
Orser, Charles E., Jr. 1988 The Material Basis of the Postbellum Tenant Plantation: Historical Archaeology in the Piedmont of South Carolina. University of Georgia Press, Athens.
1993 Artifacts, Networks, and Plantations: Toward a Further Understanding of the Social Aspects of Material Culture. In Historical Archaeology and the Study of American Culture, edited by Lu Ann De Cunzo and Bernard L. Herman. Winterthur Museum and Garden, Winterthur, Delaware, in press.
Otto, John S. 1985 The Migration of the Southern Plain Folk: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis. Journal of Southern History 51(2):183–200.
Owsley, Frank L. 1949 Plain Folk of the Old South. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge.
Picton John, and John Mack 1979 African Textiles: Looms, Weaving, and Design. British Museum, London.
Reitz, Elizabeth J., and Nicholas Honerkamp 1983 British Colonial Subsistence Strategy on the Southeastern Coastal Plain. Historical Archaeology 17(1): 4–26.
Robinson, W. Stitt 1979 The Southern Colonial Frontier, 1607–1763. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.
Ross, Mabel 1988 The Encyclopedia of Handspinning. Interweave Press, Loveland, Colorado.
Rubertone Patricia E. 1989 Archaeology, Colonialism, and 17th-Century Native America: Towards an Alternative Interpretation. In Conflict in the Archaeology of Living Traditions, edited by R. Layton, pp. 32–45. Unwin Hyman, London.
Saalfeld Diedrich 1982 The Struggle to Survive. In Our Forgotten Past: Seven Centuries of Life on the Land, edited by Jerome S. Blum, pp. 110–132. Thames and Hudson, London.
Salley Alexander S., Jr. 1898 The History of Orangeburg County, South Carolina. R. Lewis Berry, Orangeburg, South Carolina.
Schafer, William A. 1968 Sectionalism and Representation in South Carolina. Da Capo Press, New York.
Sellers, Leila 1934 Charleston Business on the Eve of the American Revolution. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.
Shinnie, P. L., and F. J. Kense 1989 Archaeology of Gonja, Ghana: Excavations at Daboya. University of Calgary Press, Calgary.
Silver, Timothy 1990 A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500–1800. Cambridge University Press, New York.
Singleton, Theresa A. 1991 The Archaeology of Slave Life. In Before Freedom Came: African American Life in the Antebellum South, edited by Edward D. Campbell, Jr., and Kym S. Rice, pp. 154–191. Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, and University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville.
Smith, Greg C. 1986 Non-European Pottery at the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Site of Puerto Real, Haiti. Unpublished M.A. thesis. Department of Anthropology, University of Florida, Gainesville.
Sobel Mechal 1987 The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.
South Carolina Department of Archives and History (SCDAH) 1746 Plat of Thomas Howell Tract. Colonial Records 4:60. Columbia, South Carolina. Microfilm.
1756 Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, 16 November 1756:294. Columbia, South Carolina. Microfilm.
1760a Inventory of the Estate of Thomas Howell. South Carolina Inventories of Estates, Vol. T:394–395. Columbia, South Carolina. Microfilm.
1760b Will of Thomas Howell. Charleston County Transcripts 8:501–502. Columbia, South Carolina. Microfilm.
1766 Statutes at Large of South Carolina 10:213–215. Columbia, South Carolina. Microfilm.
1776 Will of William Howell. Kershaw County Estates, BK, A-1:68–69. Columbia, South Carolina. Microfilm.
1784 Inventory of the Estate of William Howell. Kershaw County Estates, Apartment 33, Package 1188:6. Columbia, South Carolina. Microfilm.
South, Stanley A. 1977 Method and Theory in Historical Archeology. Academic Press, New York.
South Carolina Gazette 1739 Classified Advertisement for Joseph Crell Plantation. South Carolina Gazette, September 1. South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.
1755 Classified Advertisement for Alex McGregor Plantation. South Carolina Gazette, January 30. South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.
Spencer, Mary Ellen 1982 Food in Seventeenth-Century Tidewater Virginia: A Method for Studying Historical Cuisines. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg. University Microfilms, Ann Arbor.
Thompson, Leonard, and Howard Lamar 1981 Comparative Frontier History. In The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared, edited by Leonard Thompson and Howard Lamar, pp. 3–13. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut.
Tordoff Jeffrey P. 1979 Some Observations on the Quantitative Relationship Between Stanley South’s Artifact Patterns and “Primary De Facto” Refuse. Historical Archaeology 13: 38–47.
Turner, Frederick J. 1893 The Significance of the Frontier in American History. American Historical Association, Annual Report for the Year 1893:199–221. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C.
Tyron, Rolla M. 1966 Household Manufactures in the United States, 1640–1860. A. M. Kelley, New York.
Usner, Daniel H., Jr. 1992 Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.
Vlach, John M. 1991 By the Work of Their Hands: Studies in Afro-American Folklife. University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville.
Wahlman, Maude S. 1972 Yoruba Pottery-Making Techniques. Beitrage Zur Volkerkunde 20:313–346.
1986 Religious Symbols in Afro-American Folk Art. New York Folklore 12(1–2):1–24.
Wheaton, Thomas R., Amy Friedlander, and Patrick H. Garrow 1983 Yaughan and Curriboo Plantations: Studies in Afro-American Archaeology. Soil Systems, Atlanta, Georgia.
Wheaton, Thomas R., and Patrick H. Garrow 1985 Acculturation and the Archaeological Record in the Carolina Lowcountry. In The Archaeology of Slavery and Plantation Life, edited by Theresa A. Singleton, pp. 239–259. Academic Press, New York.
Wissler Clark 1938 The American Indian: An Introduction to the Anthropology of the New World. Oxford University Press, London.
Wood, Peter H. 1974 Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
Yentsch, Anne 1990 Minimum Vessel Lists as Evidence of Change in Folk and Courtly Traditions of Food Use. Historical Archaeology 24(3):24–53.
1991 Chesapeake Artefacts and Their Cultural Context: Pottery and the Food Domain. Post-Medieval Archaeology 25:25–72.
Yoder Don 1976 Folklife Studies in American Scholarship. In American Folklife, edited by Don Yoder, pp. 3–18. University of Texas Press, Austin.
Zelinsky, Wilbur 1973 The Cultural Geography of the United States. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.
Zierden, Martha A., Lesley M. Drucker, and Jeanne Calhoun 1986 Home Upriver: Life on Daniel’s Island, Berkeley County, South Carolina, Vol. 1. Carolina Archaeological Services, Columbia, and the Charleston Museum, Charleston.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Groover, M.D. Evidence for folkways and cultural exchange in the 18th-century South Carolina Backcountry. Hist Arch 28, 41–64 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374180
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374180