Standing the test of time: embankment investigations, their implications for African technology transfer and effect on African American archaeology in South Carolina

Abstract

Thousands of Africans were taken from their homelands, enslaved in South Carolina, and put to work for the purpose of making their plantation owning masters large profits. Rice was the crop that was responsible for this massive importation of people. Research of the last 30 years has attempted to find direct links between African technology transfer, European involvement and the relic rice fields around Charleston. This article describes the author's 17 years of historical archaeology on the embankments, ditches and fields of eighteenth and nineteenth century inland rice plantations. Regardless of who was responsible for rice in South Carolina, African hands transformed the natural environment and local geography into a hydrological network of cultivated plantations.