Socioeconomic patterning at an undocumented late 18th century lowcountry site: Spiers landing, South Carolina

Abstract

Data recovery at the Spiers Landing site (South Carolina 38BK160) was directed to the salvage of behavioral information from a construction-threatened, undocumented site which was ceramically datable to the turn of the late 18th/early 19th century. Research focused on the discovery of socioeconomic patterns associated with the occupation. Prehistoric components represented at the site included Archaic, Woodland and Mississippian periods. Analysis of faunal, floral, ceramic and structural remains associated with the historic component indicates that the site reflects a domestic occupation by low-status persons. Archival and documentary evidence strongly suggests that the site was a slave cabin on Fountainhead plantation, a part of property owned by Colonel Robert McKelvey. By 1850 the property as a whole was a small, multicommodity production unit with a focus on subsistence-level agriculture and livestock raising. The Spiers Landing site is seen as an example of low-status occupation against which other small historic surface artifact scatters can be compared in order to develop a series of distributional patterns by which low-status Afro-American and Euro-American sites of the colonial and antebellum periods can be archaeologically defined.