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Until the last third of the twentieth century, little systematic archaeological research was conducted in South Carolina. Unlike many southern states, where professional archaeologists have been at work for upward of ¤fty years, the founding of modern archaeology in South Carolina dates to the 1960s. At the 1970 meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference in Columbia, a symposium was held on changes in archaeological knowledge across the Southeast since the founding of SEAC in 1938. Great advances were noted in almost every state, but Fairbanks (1971:42) observed that “South Carolina for long was more interested in ancestors than in artifacts and [as a result] not too much information is readily available,” and that basic descriptive and chronological data was lacking for much of the state. Fortunately, from 1970 to 1999 a tremendous amount of research occurred in South Carolina, and it is probably safe to say we have as good a handle on the local prehistoric, historic, and underwater archaeological record as any other southern state. A few simple measures illustrate how far we have come. In 1960, the state site ¤les encompassed some two hundred locations recorded at the Charleston Museum. In 1970, some ¤ve hundred sites were formally recorded in the state site ¤les at the then–newly formed South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology (SCIAA) (Stephenson 1971). By 1990 the total had grown to ¤fteen thousand, and as of January 2000 just over twenty-one thousand sites had been recorded (Figure 13.1). The quantity of research and reporting has grown at a corresponding explosive rate. A comprehensive bibliography of South Carolina archaeology published in 1970 contained less than 140 entries (Thompson 1970). In 1990, that total had risen to more than thirty-seven hundred (Derting et al. 1991:ix), and from 1990 to 1999 more than ¤fteen hundred new manuscripts, reports, 13 A History of Archaeological Research in South Carolina David G. Anderson Figure 13.1. Archaeological sites in South Carolina mentioned in text. (Courtesy of Keith M. Derting, SCIAA) and documents were produced (Keith Derting, personal communication 2001). South Carolina’s archaeological literature and site ¤les have thus grown more than fortyfold since 1970, highlighting the pace of work being undertaken. It has thus been possible for some of us literally to live and work through the entire modern era of archaeological research in the state, a span that in some ways has encompassed Willey and Sabloff’s (1974) Descriptive, Classi¤catoryHistorical , and Explanatory periods or stages of American archaeological research simultaneously. A modest amount of archaeological research did occur in South Carolina in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although much of this early work is in dif¤cult-to-obtain sources. Two reviews prepared in the mid-1970s summarize this early period (Anderson 1977; Stephenson 1975), and the dramatic changes in South Carolina archaeology in recent years are examined in the 1989 festschrift volume dedicated to Dr. Robert L. Stephenson (Goodyear and Hanson 1989) and in the twenty-¤fth anniversary issue of South Carolina Antiquities , the journal of the Archaeological Society of South Carolina (ASSC), published in 1993 (Sassaman and Steen 1993). Hints of a Remote Past: Investigations from 1848 to 1963 Blanding, Schoolcraft, and Jones: Nineteenth-Century Recording of Local Remains Although archaeological remains are described by early travelers, such as Bartram (1928:258–259) in his visit to Silver Bluff along the Savannah River in 1776 (Anderson 1994:337, 355–357; Waring 1968d:258–288), detailed description of archaeological remains in South Carolina dates to 1848. In that year Dr. William Blanding’s note on the “Remains of the Wateree River, Kershaw District, South Carolina” was published (Squier and Davis 1848). Blanding reported the locations of rich surface artifact scatters in addition to discussing mounds at sites we now know were associated with the chiefdom of Co¤tachequi (DePratter 1989). In the 1850s, Henry Schoolcraft (1851–1857) reported at some length on Indian remains from South Carolina. One local informant noted, “I have many hundred arrow and spear heads, and many more are in the possession of others ” (Howe 1857:159), indicating a long history of collecting in the area. In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, Charles C. Jones wrote highly accurate accounts of local archaeological remains, including a lengthy description of the Mason’s Plantation mound group below Augusta, one of the largest Mississippian sites on the Savannah River (Jones 1873:148–157; see also Anderson 1994:193–194, 338–343). These mounds had eroded away...

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