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The thousand-acre Willtown plantation on the Edisto River is marked by an imposing antebellum home on a bluff over the river, surrounded by tidal marshes, low-lying pastures, and climax hardwood forest. About a mile from the river, in the center of the woods, is a knoll of high land covered in large hardwood trees adjacent to swampland, the latter crosscut by dikes and ditches, remnants of eighteenth-century rice production. The only sign of human habitation on the knoll is a deer-hunting stand, constructed in an oak tree, and a dirt road. With the exception of the dikes and the road, the site appears much the same as it did to arriving European colonists, those seeking their fortune through slave-based agriculture. But the wild grapevine and blanket of oak leaves mask evidence of peoples and events of eighteenth-century South Carolina, when various groups interacted , competed, and ultimately formed new identities on the colonial frontier. American frontiers are implicitly de¤ned from the perspective of the arrival of peoples of European ancestry. But the frontier was a meeting place of peoples of varied ethnic, social, and religious af¤liations; it was not so much a place as a phase of interaction within a geographic setting where native and immigrant groups competed, cooperated, and changed in relation to each other (Crass et al. 1997; Hofstra and Mitchell 1993; Mitchell 1991). European domination and Native annihilation was not always a foregone conclusion (see Kupperman 2000). The founding of new towns on the westward frontier was a common occurrence in the settlement of South Carolina and other colonies. Willtown was part of the ¤rst wave of frontier settlement from Charles Town, the point of initial English settlement in 1670. Willtown began in the 1690s as an urban center for protection from Spanish and Native invasion, for communication and worship by Europeans, and for trade with Native 12 Frontier Society in South Carolina: An Example from Willtown (1690–1800) Martha Zierden Americans. By the end of the colonial period, it was a community of EuroAmerican –owned rice plantations, operated by enslaved Africans and Native Americans, part of the larger plantation economy centered in Charleston . Research at Willtown was commissioned by the owner, Mr. Hugh Lane. Initially, the project was designed to “¤nd Willtown,” the original urban enclave. Mr. Lane greeted us with a seemingly simple, yet profoundly challenging question, “Why did Willtown fail?” To begin to answer such a question, both historically and archaeologically, requires an understanding of the panorama of Willtown’s existence, both as a nucleated settlement and as a broader community. The serendipitous discovery of James Stobo’s rice plantation on the hardwood knoll ultimately contributed more information on the history of Willtown than did research on the town itself. For the purposes of this study, the Willtown community included the town, the outlying farms and plantations, and the communities of African and Native peoples living with and around European settlers. “Community ” is considered to be a basic unit of social organization and transmission , a constantly evolving set of extrafamilial social relations. It can be based on ethnicity, religion, economic or social status, or other social constructs , or on simple geographic proximity (Horn 1994; Lewis 1984). A community, then, may be de¤ned in terms of geographic or social scale, or often both. “Pluralistic” communities are composed of individuals from diverse backgrounds, and the term implies differing social, economic, and political agendas by the community members. In many situations, people live around each other as well as with each other. There is, as a result, a heightened sense of self/other, where the physical presence of other is a constant issue in de¤ning self. In frontier communities, the relative social status of the varying groups was in ®ux, and the underclasses in many ways held great sway over the emerging dominant class (see Clement et al. 1999). The Frontier Town Although the town did not develop as intended, British colonial leaders initially envisioned Willtown as a nucleated settlement. Built on the frontier that served as a buffer from Spanish and French threat, as well as Indian raids, a close settlement was seen as essential for survival. Willtown was planned with the overlapping and seemingly con®icting goals of promoting Indian trade and protecting Charleston from Indian invasion. Situated on a high bluff on the Edisto River, the site was highly defensible and, for a few decades, well suited for commerce (Figure 12.1; see also Anthony...

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