We are delighted to have Hannah Hoover share her research about the Yamasee Indians on January 31, 2024 beginning at 2 PM in a BDC@ Beaufort Branch Local History program. We are also delighted that the Hilton Head Chapter of the Archaeological Society of South Carolina has agreed to co-sponsor her lecture.
Hannah Hoover is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Michigan and holds a research affiliation with the South Carolina Institute for Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of South Carolina. Originally from Nashville, Tennessee, she received a BA in Anthropology and Classical Studies from Tulane University in 2018 and an MA from the University of Michigan in 2021.
Her dissertation research explores community formation in colonial contexts, specifically the emergence of new Tribal Nations amidst the demographic and economic changes of the 17th-century Southeast.
For the past two years, Hoover has lived in Beaufort while working on her dissertation, tentatively titled “Small-Scale Processes of Native Nation-Building: Archaeological Investigations of early 18th century Yamasee Towns in the South Carolina Lowcountry.” She has conducted three seasons of archaeological fieldwork at the Yamasee primary town of Pocotaligo, located today on the Mackay Point Plantation, with the assistance of over 50 community and student volunteers, including our own former BDC assistant, Olivia Santos.
Her work has been funded by several granting agencies including the National Science Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Beinecke Scholarship, the Southeastern Archaeology Conference, and the Archaeological Society of South Carolina.
Colonial surveyors created stunning maps of the natural landscapes of the Carolinas during the 17th and 18th centuries. They also frequently recorded cultural features, including Native American towns, homesteads, mounds, roads, bridges, and fields that dotted the Southeast. The common appearance of such markers on regional maps, property plats, and town memorials affirms that Europeans encountered rich and intricately constructed Native worlds.
The documentary record created by early surveyors and property transactions provide a valuable means for reconstructing Native homelands in the early Carolina colony. When considered alongside archaeology and study of modern place names, we may begin to disentangle local processes of Native erasure and better realize the deep-time connections Indigenous communities continue to hold to their ancestral homelands in South Carolina.
In this presentation, Hoover will focus on Yamasee homelands in the Port Royal Sound of South Carolina. Yamasees were a broadly diverse Native community who settled in the Port Royal Sound in 1685. They formed a strong alliance with the Carolina colony by prominently participating in the regional fur and Indian slave trades. Yamasees are most well known in local and popular history for their 1715 instigation of the Yamasee War against the colony which vastly reconfigured North American geopolitics in its wake. While the causes of war have long been debated, settler encroachment and abasement of Yamasee women and lands certainly played an outsized role in souring their political relationship. Through several case studies, she will explore how some of the earliest settlers of Beaufort County sought out Yamasee homelands in the years after the Yamasee War and ultimately engaged with, erased, and in some cases rewrote Yamasee histories in the process.
Wednesday, January 31, 2024 – "Reconstructing and Reconnecting 18th Century Yamasee Homelands in the Port Royal Sound, South Carolina" with Hannah Hoover. | BDC@ Beaufort Branch Library, 311 Scott, 2 PM. | No registration process: First come; first seated. Door opens 30 minutes ahead of the program start time. | Co-sponsored by the Hilton Head Chapter, Archaeological Society of
South Carolina.
Hoover credits the resources of the Charleston County Register of Deeds office and the Behan Papers here in the Beaufort District Collection and her ongoing collaboration with Dr. Denise Bossy, Associate Professor of History at the University of North Florida for making this presentation possible.
Don't forget that there's another local history program the very next day! On February 1, 2024, we host Neil Baxley for a reprise of "
Battle of Beaufort, 1779" at the Hilton Head Branch Library. His lecture is co-sponsored by the BDC, Beaufort County Historical Society, and the Beaufort County 250th Committee.
Though the British Winter Campaign, 1778-1779 in the Palmetto State had mostly gone in Britain’s favor, South Carolina's first land based engagement between professional British, militia, and Continental forces resulted in a Patriot victory - and it was here in Beaufort County! Come learn about the strategy, tactics and significance of this American Revolution battle fought near the MCAS Air Station 245 years ago.
A native of North Carolina, Neil Baxley spent 4 years in the Marine Corps before joining the Beaufort County Sheriff's Department more than 35 years ago. In 2013, Col. Baxley was put in charge of Beaufort County's Emergency Management Division. In his spare time, he studies and writes history. He's given presentations at the South Carolina Archives and at area museums and libraries. He's authored two Confederate regimental history books, Walk in the Light: The Journey of the 10th and 19th South Carolina Volunteer Infantry (2013) and No Prouder Fate: The Story of the 11th South Carolina Volunteer Infantry (2009) and the foreword to Confederate General Stephen Elliott: Beaufort Legend, Charleston Hero by D. Michael Thomas (2020).
We hope that you will be able to join us for one - or both! programs.
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