Files
Abstract
By AD 1390, the chiefdoms of the Savannah River Valley had collapsed and the regionwas largely abandoned. In this dissertation, I discuss the effects that this abandonment had on the development of socio-political institutions and settlement systems on the Georgia Coast during the 14th and 15th centuries AD. Settlement and radiocarbon evidence suggest that the former residents of the Savannah River Valley spread to neighboring regions. Following the abandonment of the Savannah River Valley, new sites were established in the coastal region at a greater rate than ever before observed for the region. Radiocarbon evidence suggests that the timing of this shift in settlement occurred concomitant with the abandonment event. The settlement history of the Kenan Field site, a 60-ha, persistently occupied landform on Sapelo Island, GA, was examined to explore these regional changes at the scale of a single, large community. The community scale investigations demonstrated that residents of the Georgia Coast responded to the arrival of Savannah River Valley migrants through simultaneous regional dispersal and local contraction, likely related to the socially and economically driven adoption of maize agriculture. The ethnohistoric and archaeological records of the Savannah River Valley and the Georgia Coast suggest that the challenges posed by the integration of migrants into coastal society were overcome, in part, by the adoption of the council house; council houses appear archaeologically both prior to and concurrent with the migration event and are described as being the primary political apparatus of the study areas Native American population at the time of European contact, only two centuries following the migration event. This case of abandonment and migration demonstrates that social integration of migrants and locals is facilitated by the development of participatory political institutions, especially when such institutions are elaborations of historically understood organizational schemes. In this case, migration is observed to be an event that contributed to a reduction in hierarchical organization and a reformulation of systems of ranking and organization.