Provisioning the Nation

Chapter 7 provides an examination of mid-eighteenth century Catawba foodways. As the primary producers of the plant food staples that sustained their communities, Catawba women dealt with the stresses to food security brought about by the Nation’s militarism. Archaeobotanical analysis (Archaeobotany) suggests that by the early eighteenth century, maize had replaced acorns as a source of starch in Catawba diets and that once this change occurred, agricultural intensification was preferred over acorn collection during periods of stress. However, it does appear that Charraw Town residents in particular incorporated more foraged fruits into their diets on a regular basis during the mid-eighteenth century, and also seem to have been processing less food at home. The implications of these patterns are considered with regard to the Charraw’s status as a refugee community within the Catawba Nation.

Working Groups and Fashion Signals

According to the model of coalescence discussed in chapter 4, the political process of merging previously distinct communities should result in the integration of labor and collective identities. In this chapter, mid-eighteenth-century Catawba pottery and items of personal adornment are enlisted to assess whether this was the case for the people living around Nation Ford. Ceramic analysis is used to delineate constellations of practice, thereby providing information about the size of the work groups making pottery as well as the character of interaction between them. Next, patterns in the distribution of artifacts associated with mid-eighteenth-century Catawba adornment, including glass beads and metal fasteners, are examined in an effort to determine if they were being used to communicate generalized Southeastern Indian identities, matrilocal community identities, or both.

“So Warlike a Disposition”

This chapter examines how interactions with Carolina influenced Catawba militarism. In the early eighteenth century, Catawba warriors began to serve as ethnic soldiers, auxiliaries for the English colonies. These exploits provided an important venue for men to achieve notoriety, but triggered cycles of retaliation with other American Indian polities. To facilitate their military operations, defend their homes, and access the main trading path, the Catawba clustered their towns near Nation Ford. This military orientation contributed to the geopolitical persistence of the Catawba Nation, but also led to a precarious state of affairs. The ways in which Catawba men, women, and children experienced these conditions are considered, along with evidence for an episode of food insecurity in the 1750s. Militarism also encouraged the incorporation of refugees into Catawba communities, but little is known about how this process actually took place. The concepts of coalescence and ethnogenesis are used to frame questions later addressed through the examination of archaeological data in chapters 6 and 7.

Catawba

Chapter 3 documents the emergence, composition, and political interactions of the Catawba Nation through the mid-eighteenth century. Between the Spanish incursions of the 1560s and the establishment of Charles Town in 1670, a group of Catawba Valley Mississippians known as Yssa rose to become the powerful Nation of Esaws that formed the core of the eighteenth-century Catawba Nation. In the late seventeenth century this polity was a destination for European traders as well as American Indian refugees fleeing hostilities associated with the Indian Slave trade and settler territorial expansion. While many of these refugees were from the Catawba River Valley, others—most notably the Charraw—were Piedmont Siouans who fled southward from the North Carolina-Virginia border. The incorporation of refugees had significant implications for Catawba politics and daily life, which are explored in subsequent chapters.

Conclusion

This chapter examines the implications of the artifact patterns and historic accounts described in previous chapters, particularly with regard to the relationships among Catawba militarism, population aggregation, and food security. A potential link between Catawba dietary stress in the late 1750s and the severity of a small pox epidemic that ravaged the Nation Ford communities at the end of the decade is considered with reference to the concept of structural violence. The challenges faced by members of the Catawba Nation during the first half of the eighteenth century exemplify the double-edged nature of strategies available to American Indian groups seeking to maintain political autonomy in early colonial period contexts.

Hilly Land

This chapter provides a tour of the Nation Ford locality, which was the seat of the Catawba Nation in the mid-eighteenth century. The floral, faunal, geological, and infrastructural aspects of the landscape significant to the Catawba Nation’s subsistence economy and town organization are highlighted. Information from archival maps, topological relationships, and datable artifacts together are presented to argue that two archaeological sites, 38Yk434 and 38Yk17, are likely the physical remains of the Catawba towns Nassaw-Weyapee and Charraw Town, respectively. Intrasite spatial analysis is conducted using sub-surface evidence of architecture, along with artifactual evidence of activity patterns, to define the units of analysis that will be used to examine the organization of Catawba craft production (chapter 6) and foodways activities (chapter 7).

Introduction

Chapter 1 provides an orientation to the history and historiography of the Catawba people. It places the present work in the context of previous research concerning the Catawba Nation, and highlights the need for carefully evaluating and constructing narratives of change and persistence in treatments of American Indian history. Two terms used throughout the book to designate collective entities, “Nation” and “community,” are defined with reference to the works of ethnohistorians, sociologists, and anthropologists.

Carolina

This chapter examines the development of the Carolina colony from its inception through the mid-eighteenth century. In addition to providing a better understanding of Carolina’s geographic extent, composition, and interactions at mid-century, this history also highlights characteristics of settler colonialism in general, particularly the significance of initial conditions for subsequent colonial development. While at first considered a single political entity, two markedly different Carolinas emerged in the eighteenth century: North Carolina, initially guided by egalitarian defectors from Virginia, and South Carolina, dominated by Caribbean opportunists who perpetuated the export of American Indian slaves. Conflicts between these two groups and other Imperial powers drew American Indian polities into alliances that produced a cascade of long-lasting and extensive entanglements.