Navigating Power: An Archaeological Examination of Movement on Lowcountry Waterways

Schwalbe, Emily  Anne

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-m08j-ne41

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Navigating Power: An Archaeological Examination of Movement on Lowcountry Waterways

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This dissertation reconstructs North and South Carolina Lowcountry plantation waterfronts as a means of better understanding mobility, inequality, and human-environment interactions in the antebellum Lowcountry. Using a theoretical framework of hydrosociality, the author undertook archaeological and archival research to investigate the question: how did the built environment of navigable waterways simultaneously reinforce and challenge the power structures embedded in the plantation system? Colonial and antebellum roads in the Lowcountry were unreliable in the decades after colonization, and navigable waterways were essential not only for the agricultural success of plantations, but also for movement between plantations and urban centers. Plantations were entirely dependent on the enslaved laborers who not only cultivated the plantation’s cash crop, but who were also tasked with transporting commodities and people along the numerous rivers and creeks that make up the Lowcountry. The regular use of navigable waterways was facilitated by characteristic infrastructure, including wharves, rice gates, and watercraft. This study integrates the traditionally siloed approaches of terrestrial and underwater archaeology by theorizing waterways as extensions of the Lowcountry plantation landscape and is based on three phases of multi-methodology field research and analysis. The author juxtaposes the spatial relationships of submerged infrastructural features, artifact deposits, and terrestrial loci with each other and uses these spatially organized datasets to conduct GIS mobility analyses as one way of better understanding how and where marginalized people could have moved outside the routes detailed in the historical record. The author argues that these paths illustrate enslaved Africans’ alternative geographies of self-liberation within the hydrological environment.

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