Landscapes of movement on lowcountry rice plantations

Abstract

Navigable waterways were essential to European colonization of the South Carolina Lowcountry beginning in the late 17th century. Despite early attempts by colonial leaders to keep land grants within close proximity to Charleston, colonists quickly began to establish plantations where the land was amenable for commodity production and scattered throughout the region. Consequently, colonists and enslaved individuals utilized navigable waterways by extending the built environment into the water through wharves, landings, and watercraft, as well as modifying the waterways themselves for irrigation, agriculture, and mobility. Despite the importance of waterways in the function of plantations, most landscape studies have focused on terrestrial contexts. This paper proposes that waterway assemblages should be integrated into plantation landscape studies as a means of understanding the role of movement in commodity production, surveillance, and communication to better reconstruct everyday life, focusing on the preliminary remote sensing fieldwork of two antebellum plantation waterfronts as case studies.