The Sea Islands and neighboring mainland were home to several Indigenous Nations at the time of European contact. As colonialism took root, the region between Spanish-Colonial Santa Elena and British-Colonial Charles Town became borderlands to Western colonizers and cycled between places of refuge and sites of conflict for Indigenous groups who remained. We use our recent discovery of a 17th century Indigenous occupation at Pockoy Island, a small island on the coast of South Carolina bordering Edisto Island, to broadly consider the Edisto Nation during the early colonial era. Relying on Western narratives and maps, we trace the Edisto as they moved from the Port Royal area to the Island that still bears their name. Among the questions we consider: Was village mobility part of traditional practice for Indigenous coastal groups, and, if so, how did mobility change as Western settlers increasingly claimed the Sea Islands as their own?

During recent excavations at Pocotaligo—an early 18th-century Yamasee town that later transformed into an antebellum plantation in coastal South Carolina—archaeologists recovered numerous expediently worked glass tools. Flintknapping is frequently framed as a prehistoric Indigenous stone-tool technology. Yet, our analysis of tool form, glass type, and use-wear indicates not only the incorporation of new materials into traditional Yamasee practices but also later flintknapping traditions among 19th-century enslaved people, alongside other cottage industries. Recovered from commingled plowzone contexts, these everyday tools challenge racialized assumptions about who made and used flintknapping technologies. Taken together, they offer a view of a material commons, an overlapping field of practice mobilized at different times by these communities as they operated within and against extractive settler ecologies. These tools invite a closer look at the sociotechnical threads that persist across colonial ruptures and the implicit boundaries archaeologists often impose on material and temporal categories.

Guns are emotive artifacts with violent genealogies. Practically, they were also complex objects requiring an infrastructure of people and spaces to maintain them. These material networks unfurling across the Atlantic and throughout early America encourage a reconsideration of colonial sites where white, Black, and Indigenous worlds collide at a single place via the movement (and care) of artifacts like firearms. From the 1730s to 1768, at least eleven enslaved artisans and specialists (gunsmiths, blacksmiths, carpenters, and domestic laborers) likely lived and certainly labored at 87 Church Street, where archaeologists excavated the remains of this gunsmithing operation over the last fifty years. Revisiting this site and the archive reveal the complex contours of firearm networks at this urban townlot, including the presence of Indigenous delegations having their guns repaired throughout the mid-eighteenth century. This paper considers these moments and spaces of colonial entanglement that belie the boundaries between scholarly literatures.

Control over mobility was a central facet of oppression during enslavement. Africans, Indigenous peoples, and Europeans navigated the complex dynamics of control and freedom through bodily autonomy and the mobilization of resources across local and regional landscapes. This essay examines the movements of Black and Indigenous communities within these colonial spaces, focusing on the creation of Fort Mose—the first legally-sanctioned free Black community in what would later become the United States. Located just two miles north of Spanish St. Augustine, Fort Mose was situated near an Indigenous mission. The existence of this free community paralleled an era of African enslavement within St. Augustine, highlighting a contrast between freedom and bondage. Through an analysis of maps, historical accounts, and archaeological evidence, this essay explores the complex relationship between mobility and degrees of freedom, offering insight into how movement shaped the lives of Black and Indigenous people in Spanish colonial landscape.

This paper examines the mobility of enslaved and emancipated individuals, tracing how they navigated and redefined colonial landscapes on the Sierra Leone peninsula, using Regent Village as a case study. It integrates pedestrian survey, archival analysis, and the study of architectural and archaeological remains to reconstruct the spatial organization of the village and its transformation over time. Through this multi-scalar approach, I investigate how Black settlers and their descendants engaged with and reinterpreted the material impositions of colonial authority—such as street layouts and building plans—developing alternative architectural forms and communal spaces that fostered social relations. Drawing on Ingold’s concept of dwelling and Harvey’s notion of spaces of representation, I demonstrate how material practices and spatial reconfigurations reveal enduring strategies of Black resourcefulness, place-making, and resilience. These spatial strategies also illuminate how post-abolition Black communities forged a shared sense of belonging, negotiated identities, and subtle opposition to colonial rule.

The Santee Delta, a remote tidal marsh system located on the coast of South Carolina between Charleston and Georgetown, was the heart of rice culture in the Atlantic World during the Antebellum period. Enslaved people converted this wetland environment into a thriving industrial complex centered on the growth and processing of rice. At the apex of rice production, thousands of enslaved people lived and worked in the Santee Delta, yet very little is known of their daily lives. After emancipation, the fields were abandoned and the marsh reclaimed most evidence of human occupation. By comparing archaeological data collected from two sites located between the Santee river branches, and using multiple lines of evidence, this paper will show how enslaved people lived and worked in this remote borderland.

Fifty years ago, Peter Wood’s work Black Majority highlighted the ways that enslaved African and Indigenous people transformed the landscape of the Lowcountry. Within his narrative, he points to a sea change in the colony’s economy – a shift from subsistence agriculture, cattle raising, and timber production to the creation of a vast agricultural system for rice production at the turn of the 18^th century. At the time of Wood’s writing, historical archaeologists in the region could not contribute significantly to this narrative, as they were just beginning to take on the challenges of surveying and excavating Lowcountry plantation settlements. Over the last five decades, however, myriad surveys associated with the region’s development have amassed a database of hundreds of sites dating to this crucial period. In this paper, I will utilize these data to explore how the economic sea change was inscribed into the Lowcountry’s early colonial landscape.

Captive Africans in the Lowcountry USA created Gullah culture during the early 18th century. On the rice plantations, they were forced co-creators of an extractive monocrop landscape. Simultaneous with this forced role, they created a Black Commons through distinct ways of being and interacting with the natural world and each other. Laurel Hill rice plantation was one of the large, productive 18th-19th century plantations of the Waccamaw Neck region of coastal South Carolina included in Charles Joyner’s Down by the Riverside. While most of the rice plantations of this region were destroyed by development, the remains of Laurel Hill are relatively preserved as part of the nonprofit Brookgreen Gardens. In this paper we offer interpretations of Captive African and free Gullah life at Laurel Hill through the frame of Black Commons and discuss the unrealized potential of Laurel Hill and similar sites for Gullah living heritage.

J. T. Roane defines the “Black Commons” as the distinctive and often furtive social architecture that enslaved, free, and emancipated Black communities created rivaling, threatening, and challenging the infrastructures of commodification and social control developed by White elites. Combining landscape mapping, archaeological research, and historic plats, I explore the ways Gullah Geechee people extended their extra labor into subversive forms of leisure and remapped plantation ecologies outside the landscapes and waterscapes of domination that defined plantation geographies. With a focus on four adjacent plantations on the North Santee River in the Carolina lowcountry, I consider the ways enslaved and emancipated communities created a set of communal resources where they hunted and fished, gathered wild plants, healed the sick, interceded with the spirit world, gathered clay to make pottery, or left the plantation as a temporary or permanent reprieve In the forests and waterways -- in places out of view.

The 21^st-century water crisis in Flint, Michigan relates to J. T. Roane’s idea of the Black Commons by defining the stakes in African-American resource stewardship or the constitution of Black ecologies. The state of emergency declared in 2016, two years after the start of the disaster, supported the removal and replacement of thousands of lead water connections and other measures to improve the safety of municipal water in Flint. The work to locate and remediate buried lead water connections was confounded by a lack of records with specific locations of connecting lines, requiring prospection through excavation and drawing out the crisis. Roane borrows the term plotting to describe the work of collective action, founded in community, that is characterized as insurgency challenging the discursive basis for administered, networked infrastructure, commodification, and associated social control. This archaeology of Flint’s water crisis attempts to describe the conflicting ecologies engaged in this emergency.

In the 21st century, the Southside of Chicago is still, as St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton termed it, a “Black Metropolis.” We are inspired by the themes of this session, especially the notion of the Black commons, to reflect upon desire paths in the Black Metropolis. Desire paths emerge when humans find their own way between important points on the landscape. This paper encourages us as archaeologists to look at the spaces in between. What unofficial paths do people take through a cityscape, especially one that has been historically underserved by public transportation infrastructure? What nodes continue to draw Chicago’s pedestrians over time? What role do vacant lots play in the process, and what has been the effect of recent gentrification? Are we witnessing a 21st century enclosure of the commons? What does it look like, materially, when Black people “make a way out of no way?”

Sediment cores from historic rice field impoundments at Hobcaw Barony, South Carolina, record centuries of landscape engineering by enslaved Africans and their descendants. By comparing stratigraphic and geochemical signatures across multiple fields, we demonstrate how localized agro-ecological practices created both convergent and divergent soil conditions that reflect shifting social boundaries. Fields interconnected through communal labor routes and provisioning networks share similar organic-rich sediment horizons, while peripheral plots exhibit distinct mineral assemblages, signaling alternative soil management strategies and varied responses to estuarine dynamics. These sedimentary contrasts delineate dynamic cores and margins at multiple scales—from plantation and community plots to broader watershed contexts—highlighting how enslaved communities exercised environmental agency within oppressive plantation structures. By interpreting sediments as active archives of past human decisions rather than passive accumulations, this geoarchaeological approach provides a rigorous framework for investigating social boundaries, cultural resilience, and multi-scalar connectivity in other estuarine borderlands.

The University of South Carolina served as a home to students, faculty, and enslaved African Americans for over fifty years during the early nineteenth century. Located at the heart of the state's capital, the university has represented an isolated community, for much of its existence literally walled off from the rest of the city. For the past two years, students in service-learning courses at USC have conducted archaeological investigations of a kitchen building associated with the first president's house, which also likely served as housing for individuals enslaved at [and by] the university. This paper discusses the results of these excavations, exploring the ways in which individuals enslaved at the university leveraged local social networks and material culture to negotiate life within the confines of an enclosed institutional landscape.