Deflowering Lowcountry Forests / Archaeo-politics of Flow

Old-growth woodlands are often known as “virgin forests,” indicating that they have not yet been touched by man. Literature historic and contemporary describes ancient longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) forests in this way, despite ample documentation that the first peoples living within these coastal ecosystems of the American Southeast used controlled burns to manage woodlands. Longleaf forests, then, can only be considered virginal if Indigenous peoples are not considered human. By contrast, South Carolina Lowcountry rivers, weaving between those pine stands, were never described as virginal. Even new settlers realized these slow-flowing rivers’ ability to bring disparate communities of people and goods into intimate contact with one another. And for these reasons, Lowcountry rivers were used to carry vast numbers of felled trees to coastal ports. In the nineteenth century, the Waccamaw River alone carried millions of longleaf pines to the port of Georgetown in Winyah Bay, where they were shipped to New England for the construction of seagoing ships. With new archaeological, archival, and ecological evidence, alongside an Indigenous perspective, this paper reevaluates the Lowcountry maritime timber trade in the recent past. Ultimately, it offers alternative ways to understand place-based dynamics that differ from shipbuilding histories that focus on the legacies of timber barons alone.