Graduation Term

2022

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Department of Sociology and Anthropology: Archaeology

Committee Chair

Kathryn Sampeck

Abstract

Ani-Kitu Hwagi (Cherokee) settlements across the Southeastern United States have been intensively studied to evaluate how social dynamics, gender roles, and economic disruption came to impact levels of stability and variability within both domestic and public structures or spaces during the seventeenth to eighteenth century. Some studies characterize this period by using the term “Shatter Zone” to describe a historical model for the US Southeast that emphasizes a landscape of disruption characterized by population displacement, widespread disease, increased levels of slavery, and economic disruption. I reorient analyses of archaeological evidence of this timeframe in terms of center places, a conceptual framework of attachment between Ani-Kitu Hwagi individuals and their communities and ancestral past, and survivance, a critical theory about cultural resilience. This study identifies trends in architectural features, belonging assemblages, and settlement spatial patterns from 21 Ani-Kitu Hwagi or similar style archaeological sites in northern Georgia, western North Carolina and South Carolina, and eastern Tennessee to display forms of survival and resiliency that exist during the thirteenth through nineteenth centuries. The trends of structure size, hearth size, structure shape, and spatial patterning demonstrate forms of vivid survivance as an active process of Indigenous avoidance of subjugation and victimry.

Access Type

Thesis-Open Access

DOI

https://doi.org/10.30707/ETD2022.20220705065052503684.999982

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