Cable John S. - Megadrought in the Carolinas

At the Margins of South Appalachian Mississippian Interaction

As we move in space from the center of the areawhich, it may be noted, is not of necessity the geographical centerand extraneous cultural elements begin to intrude, we shall come at length to a place where the culture, for the ethnologist, is what may be called weak.

Melville Herskovits, A Preliminary Consideration of the Culture Areas of Africa, 1924

Anthropologist Melville Herskovitss stand against heterogeneous and poorly integrated cultural expressions comes across as somewhat prejudiced, but I do not believe that he intended to cast geographic patterns of culture in a negative light. He was attempting to explain the divergent characteristics of cultures situated at the interfaces between typical cultures and those with vivid and extensive cultural expressions. Kopytoff (1987:5) recognized the same phenomenon when he described the groups situated along the frontier interstices between dominant sub-Saharan cultures in Africa as not quite formed societies. What he meant by this description was that these interstices were populated by multicultural groups with diverse ethnic backgrounds that came together to form societies with new institutions and adaptations that differed in significant ways from their various parent communities. The Mississippian settlement of the Central Coast was in many ways just such an intermediate cultural expression.It was a new society, forming late in the process of Mississippianization and attempting to adapt the basic tenets of South Appalachian Mississippianism to an environment that was poorly suited for intensive corn agriculture, the prime mover of SAMs chiefdom tribute systems and demographic expansion. The abandonment of the region in the middle of the fifteenth century cut short the experiment. I show in the chapters to come that this event was not limited to the Central Coast but extended to a much larger area of the Georgia and South Carolina Coastal Plain, most likely as a consequence of megadrought. In this chapter, I present an overview of the Mississippian occupation of the Central Coast to set the stage for a better understanding of the broader implications of this event.

By far, the microenvironment most intensively exploited by Mississippian populations on the Central Coast was the tidal creek mouths of Bulls Bay and Cape Romain (). The creek mouths have been investigated over a span of 24 km and extensive Mississippian occupations have been documented from as far north as Jeremy Creek at McClellanville, South Carolina, to the northern end of Sewee Bay at Andersonville. Southward, the creek mouths are submerged below sea level and this probably served as both an environmental and cultural boundary, effectively separating the groups around Bulls Bay from contemporaneous formations to the south along Copahee Bay, Hamlin Sound, and Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.

The Bulls Bay estuary was a major focus of Mississippian subsistence strategies. The shell middens that demarcate the settlements are not highly mounded, ranging between 25 cm and 80 cm in thickness, but they are horizontally extensive. None of the site clusters have received the kind of broadscale excavation that would expose house patterns, but when similar middens have been peeled away along tidal creek mouths in Beaufort, South Carolina (Mozingo et al. 2004), Georgia (Keene 2004; Pearson 1984), and North Carolina (Millis 2011), ample evidence of domestic structures has emerged. The contemporary Broad Reach site in Carteret County, North Carolina, although not Mississippian in affiliation, is particularly informative. Here, 9 acres of topsoil and shell midden were stripped away, exposing 22,265 postholes and over 100 house plans, numerous human and dog burials, and a wide range of pit types (Millis 2011:6-2). The late prehistoric shell middens along Bulls Bay are of comparable extent and likely contain similar configurations of residential features. Tibwin Creek supports two of the most intensively shovel-tested Bulls Bay clusters. Three major residential sectors have been defined in the North Tibwin tract (Cable 2002a), which together encompass 14.5 acres. The South Tibwin tract has been subjected to two intensive surveys (Brockington and Associates 2011; Cable et al. 1994) and limited test excavations (Cable et al. 2005). The two mainclusters there cover 11.6 acres. Smaller clusters across both tracts add an additional 2.9 acres of either residential space or special activity area. Similar aggregations occur across each of the tidal creek mouths.