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.

Keywords:

• rice cultivation
• slavery
• West Africa
• technology transfer
• South Carolina

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr Kenneth Kelly for allowing me the opportunity to publish this work. Special thanks to Dr Theodore Rosengarten and Dr Max Edelson for comments on earlier versions of this article. I also thank the Lane Family of Willtown Bluff, The Charleston Museum, Brockington and Associates, Beazer Homes, E.I. Nemours DuPont Corporation, South Carolina Department of Transportation, Charleston County, and the Archaeological Research Collective, Inc. Lastly, I thank Dr Hayden Smith and Charlie Philips for their love of rice history and Carolina swamps.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Andrew Agha has 17 years of working experience in the fields of Historical Archaeology and Anthropology and focuses primarily on the ways enslaved Africans influenced and affected the origins of South Carolina agriculture. His Masters Degree was earned in 2004 from the University of South Carolina. He currently sits as President of the Archaeological Research Collective, Inc.

Notes

1. Wood, Black Majority; Littlefield, Rice and Slaves; Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit; Carney and Porcher, Geographies of the Past; Stewart, What Nature Suffers to Groe; Carney, Black Rice; Edelson, Plantation Enterprise; Fields-Black, Deep Roots.

2. Agha, Philips, and Fletcher, Inland Swamp Rice Context, E3–E4; Heyward, Seed From Madagascar; Doar, Rice and Rice Planting; Porcher, “Rice Culture”; Carney, Black Rice, 83–84.

3. Alpern, “Eighteenth-Century Rice Boom”; Eltis, Morgan, and Richardson, “Agency and Diaspora.”

4. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves; Carney, “Landscapes of Technology Transfer”; Carney, Black Rice.

5. Ascher and Fairbanks, “Excavations of a Slave Cabin”; Wheaton, Friedlander, and Garrow, Yaughan and Curriboo; Singleton, “The Archaeology of Slavery”; Singleton, I, Too, Am America; Adams, “Early African-American Domestic Architecture”; Adams, “South Carolina Slave Houses”; Ferguson, Uncommon Ground; Agha, “Searching for Cabins.”

6. Agha, “Rice Dike Construction,” 275–282.

7. Zierden, Linder, and Anthony, Willtown.

8. Ferguson, Uncommon Ground; Singleton, “The Archaeology of Slavery”; Singleton, I, Too, Am America; Joseph et al. “Historical Archaeology”; Orser, “Archaeology of the African Diaspora”; Ogundiran and Falola, Archaeology of Atlantic Africa.

9. Agha, “Rice Dike Construction,” 279–282.

10. Agha, “Inland Swamp Rice Embankment.”

Agha and Philips, “Landscapes of Cultivation,” 20–22.

11. Carney, Black Rice.

12. Heyward, Seed from Madagascar, 12–13; Agha, Philips, and Fletcher, Inland Swamp Rice Context, F41–48.

13. Chambliss and Bailey, Palmetto Commerce Park Tract.

14. Lansdell, Philips, and Bailey, Weber Research Tract.

15. Chambliss and Bailey, Palmetto Commerce Park Tract.

16. Franz, Agha, and Philips, Bolton on the Stono, 29–30.

17. Ibid., 258.

18. Agha, Philips, and Isenbarger, Traditions in Rice and Clay.

19. Smith, “Rich Swamps and Rice Ground,” 95–104.

20. Agha, Philips, and Isenbarger, Traditions in Rice and Clay, 48.

21. Ibid., 55.

22. Agha et al., Palmetto Commerce Parkway Extension.

23. Agha, Philips, and Fletcher, Inland Swamp Rice Context.

24. Ibid., E25.

25. Miller, Soil Survey of Charleston.

26. Agha, Philips, and Fletcher, Inland Swamp Rice Context, E30.

27. Ibid., A-1–A-39.

28. Garrow and Elliot, Crowfield Archaeological Survey, 65.

29. Wood, Locke and Agrarian Capitalism, 60–64.

30. Fields-Black, Deep Roots; Fall, Elhadj Ibrahima, personal communication, September 2013.

31. Ferguson, Sierra Leone Field Notes.

32. Anthony, “Colono wares”; Anthony, “Tangible Interaction”; Ferguson, Uncommon Ground.

Isenbarger, “Potters, Hucksters and Consumers”; Agha, St. Giles Kussoe, 71.

33. Agha, Philips, and Isenbarger, Traditions in Rice and Clay, 3–6.

34. Ibid., 618–620.

35. Ibid.

36. Wheaton, Friedlander, and Garrow, Yaughan and Curriboo; Drucker and Anthony, Spiers Landing Site, 125–127.

37. Drucker and Anthony, Spiers Landing Site, 125–127.

38. Wheaton, Friedlander, and Garrow, Yaughan and Curriboo.

39. Denyer, African Traditional Architecture.

40. Ibid., 35, 71, 167.

41. Agha, St. Giles Kussoe, 12, 24.

42. Ferguson, Uncommon Ground; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint; Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll; Pollitzer, The Gullah People.