The Archaeological Society of South Carolina (ASSC) will hold the 51st Annual Conference on South Carolina Archaeology on February 15, 2025 at Gambrell Hall at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. The conference will be held from 8 am to 5 pm and will include general paper and poster sessions, a thematic paper session, and a seventeenth century artifact workshop hosted by Nicole Isenbarger. We look forward to seeing you all there!

This year’s thematic session is The Carolina Colony: Highlighting Seventeenth Century Interactions in English Colonial South Carolina. This dynamic period witnessed complex and dynamic interactions between English colonists, indigenous groups, enslaved Africans, indentured servants, non-English colonists, and other European powers. Thematic papers will concentrate on archaeological collections and sites associated with English colonial interactions during the first three decades (circa 1670-1699) of the proprietary Carolina colony. The session will feature Dr. Andrew Agha of Aghatech Industries, LLC, as keynote speaker.

Nicole Isenbarger of the Charles Towne Landing State Historic Site will be hosting a seventeenth century artifact workshop at the conference that will include an assortment of key artifacts from South Carolina collections. Anyone interested in sharing material culture from other 17^th century archaeological contexts is invited to contact Nicole and the ASSC at Annual_Conference_Committee@archaeologysc.org. A secure room will be provided for participants to display artifacts, but space is limited, so please get in touch as soon as possible. 

Conference attendance is free to all current ASSC members, or $10.00 at the door. You can renew your membership online here, or in person at the conference.

About Our Keynote Speaker

Dr. Andrew Agha of Aghatech Industries, LLC, will present the keynote address: Property Matters: How John Locke’s Modern Property Theory and The First Earl of Shaftesbury’s Scientific Interests Influenced the Origins of Carolina’s Plantation Society.

Abstract: Carolina has been interpreted as a colony created for the profit of a few from the labor of many. This talk aims to point out an alternate interpretation of the colony’s origins: that the introduction of modern property to Carolina in the 1670s instigated new social relations between those with the rights to property, those without, and the laborers forced to work inside and outside of property. Private property redefined the use of space and the ways people interacted with the land and with each other. When Shaftesbury brought Locke into his colonial Carolina project, the development of the colony took on a completely different—modern—composure that reoriented and reinvented the social relations that bound enslaved Africans and indentured servants to the land they worked and to those with power over them. The archaeological remains of seventeenth century settlements, gardens, and landscapes now take on new meaning and can be identified as the materiality of the transplanted “English Country Estate”, a form of private property that was modernized through the labor of scientific experimentation into the modern Carolina plantation. On these early “plantations”, laborers became the colony’s first scientific technicians as they molded and altered the land through new forms of agriculture and husbandry.