Frontier Change, Institution Building, and the Archaeological Record in the South Carolina Backcountry

The evolution of a colonial agricultural region is dependent on the creation of social institutions that restructure production, processing, and transportation and permit its integration within a larger commercial export-oriented economy. Creating such institutions in the absence of higher authority requires mechanisms of social cooperation that emerge as a result of the actions of individual agents who develop strategies that reflect self-interest but create mutually beneficial results. A broad-scale examination of documentary sources and archaeological materials from Camden, South Carolina, demonstrates the occurrence of such an economic transformation in the Backcountry during the third quarter of the eighteenth century. On a narrower scale these data also provide evidence for the central role of Joseph Kershaw, a merchant whose development of network strategies brought together the elements necessary to permit the emergence of a commercial economy in the Backcountry. Understanding tiie mechanisms that underlay tiie process of the transition from an agricultural frontier to a commercial economy is crucial to explaining the development of the South Carolina Backcountry. Scholars of the American colonial experience have long been aware that dramatic changes occurred in the frontier economy of the southern Backcountry in the years following its initial colonization. Immigrating from complex societies of western Europe, most settlers came to the interior intending to continue their Uves as farmers, merchants, or artisans in a commercial economy, but conditions in the new country made it impossible for them to immediately recreate traditional patterns. In a sparsely settled and relatively isolated region, they faced the task of recreating a commercial economy and a stable poUtical and social environment in die absence of die infrastructural elements necessary to support production and trade. These conditions initiaUy promoted an inwardly directed economy in which an emphasis on regional seh-sufficiency encouraged economic diversification, promoted local reinvestment of surpluses, and stimulated the growth of indigenous social institutions that served as the basis for organizing the region and overseeing its eventual transformation into the greater mitieu (Clark 1972:165166; Kulikoff 1992:16-17, 1993:343-344, 2000:205-207; MitcheU 1969:109-113, 1977:475-476, 1977:4-6; Moore 2007:45; Nobles 1989:552-653; Rothenberg 1981:283314; Unser 1987:166-167). Institutions are complexes of behavior patterns that constitute the established forms or set methods of procedure governing group actions and underlie the structure of communal Ufe (Lowie 1948:chaps. 4-9). Institutions of trade, government, and reUgion organized European society at multiple levels (Braudel 1979:29-30, 81-85; 1986:66-77, 150-160, 180-190; Bridenbaugh 1968:83, 119-121; Laslett 1971:chap. 3; Plumb 1972:14-27; Schlumbohm 1992:183-199) and facUitated die development of a commercial economy. The process by which colonists sought to repUcate complex institutional structures of similar function in the New World has been documented elsewhere (Baldwin 1954:130-131; Casagrande et al. 1964; Lewis 1984a; Steffen 1980:xii-xvii) but generaUy on a regional scale too broad to identify and examine the mechanisms by which it occurred. This paper will employ documentary and archaeological information to examine the mechanisms through which frontier residents created die institutions that made possible the South Carolina Backcountry's transition to a commercial economy. It wul focus on the Wateree Valley and its central settlement of Pine Tree HUl, later Camden, as a case study of the transitional process and seek evidence for change in the material record of this settlement. Because institution building on the frontier involved the creation of social structures, rather than their imposition from the outside, an examination of this phenomenon cannot be confined to tiie broader regional scale on which the process occurred. …

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