Influences of Native American land use on the Colonial Euro-American settlement of the South Carolina Piedmont.

Michael R Coughlan,Donald R Nelson,Sergi Lozano

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0195036

Abstract

We test the hypothesis that prehistoric Native American land use influenced the Euro-American settlement process in a South Carolina Piedmont landscape. Long term ecological studies demonstrate that land use legacies influence processes and trajectories in complex, coupled social and ecological systems. Native American land use likely altered the ecological and evolutionary feedback and trajectories of many North American landscapes. Yet, considerable debate revolves around the scale and extent of land use legacies of prehistoric Native Americans. At the core of this debate is the question of whether or not European colonists settled a mostly “wild” landscape or an already “humanized” landscape. We use statistical event analysis to model the effects of prehistoric Native American settlement on the rate of Colonial land grants (1749–1775). Our results reveal how abandoned Native American settlements were among the first areas claimed and homesteaded by Euro-Americans. We suggest that prehistoric land use legacies served as key focal nodes in the Colonial era settlement process. As a consequence, localized prehistoric land use legacies likely helped structure the long term, landscape- to regional-level ecological inheritances that resulted from Euro-American settlement.

Highlights

The process of Euro-American settlement of the South Carolina Piedmont, and elsewhere, established historically and spatially contingent land-use patterns that continue to influence the trajectories of social-ecological landscapes [1,2,3,4]
We empirically demonstrate tangible historical links between millennial prehistoric Native American land use and the Euro-American settlement process for the Sumter National Forest in the South Carolina Piedmont
We cannot assert that Native American land use legacies directly caused the settlement location choices of Euro-Americans, the earliest EuroAmericans to settle the South Carolina Piedmont exhibited a preference for long term and late prehistoric Native American occupation sites above environmental characteristics including topographic position, slope, aspect, soil moisture, and solar radiation

Summary

Introduction

The process of Euro-American settlement of the South Carolina Piedmont, and elsewhere, established historically and spatially contingent land-use patterns that continue to influence the trajectories of social-ecological landscapes [1,2,3,4]. Settlers did not randomly scatter across the landscape, but rather, conditioned their choices to a set of criteria that reflected the demands of contemporary cultural, economic and agricultural systems. The land these settlers encountered was not pristine untouched wilderness, but a landscape that was shaped and modified by Native American populations for thousands of years [8]. To explain the significance of this patterning, we draw on the concept of ecological inheritance from niche construction theory [9]

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Conclusion