Megadrought in the Carolinas : the archaeology of Mississippian collapse, abandonment, and coalescence / John S. Cable
- Author:
- Cable, John S.
- Published:
- Tuscaloosa : The University of Alabama Press, [2020]
- Copyright Date:
- ©2020
- Physical Description:
- xvi, 311 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.
- Series:
- Contents:
- The Central South Carolina Coast : at the margins of South Appalachian Mississippian interaction -- A model of ceramic change for the eastern wing of South Appalachian Mississippian -- The fifteenth-century depopulation of the Central South Carolina Coast -- The cultural and natural geography of megadrought -- Regions of the Greater Desert of Ocute -- Migration to the ring of drought resilience -- Drought-related indigenous disease epidemics -- The broader implications of late prehistoric societal collapse and transformation in the southern latitudes of the United States during an age of global warming.
- Summary:
- "An enigma in southeastern archaeology is why a vast swath of land in coastal central South Carolina was abandoned in the 1400s. By 1540 and the Spanish Entrada of De Soto, this area was called the Desert of Ocute, after the Ocute people. Cable's long-term research shows that abandonment took place because of prolonged drought, in fact a megdraought, as there was elsewhere from Chaco Canyon to Cahokia in earlier centuries. This book considers the implications of the displacement of the Ocute into the surrounding settlements. Cable suggests that these immigrants experienced regional hostility and that new cultural groups formed that began to replace the old social structure of chiefdoms and platform mounds. Confederated societies emerged that had a much wider geographic reach. Crowding into the sustainable river valleys of the Piedmont and Mountain zones necessitated technological and social adaptations for an intensification of agriculture. Cable surmises that if European contact had been delayed several hundred years, these peoples would have developed as per the complex Cahokians"--
- Subject(s):
- Indians of North America—South Carolina—Atlantic Coast—Antiquities
- Mississippian culture—South Carolina—Atlantic Coast
- Droughts—South Carolina—History
- Human beings—Effect of climate on—South Carolina—Atlantic Coast
- Ethnoecology—South Carolina—Atlantic Coast
- Environmental archaeology—South Carolina—Atlantic Coast
- Antiquities
- Droughts
- Environmental archaeology
- Human beings—Effect of climate on.
- Indians of North America—Antiquities
- Indigenous peoples—Ecology
- Mississippian culture
- Atlantic Coast (S.C.)—Antiquities
- South Carolina
- South Carolina—Atlantic Coast
- Genre(s):
- ISBN:
- 9780817320461 hardcover
0817320466 hardcover - Note:
- "A Dan Josslyn memorial publication"--Title page verso.
- Bibliography Note:
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-299) and index.
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