Navigating Environment, History, and Archaeology in Portsmouth Island, USA

Abstract

Entering North Carolina’s outer banks inlets along the southeastern United States seaboard required experience and skill in navigating the treacherous and constantly shifting sand shoals at inlets, knowns as “the swash”. African Americans served in a variety of diverse capacities as inlet pilots, boatmen, fishermen, and domestic servants meeting critical social and economic needs on barrier islands from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Their archaeological footprint in national historic districts, like Portsmouth village, is ephemeral. Historical narratives predominantly highlight the roles of Euro-Americans in founding and sustaining the Ocracoke inlet maritime community during its nineteenth century heyday when the small port communities served as major transshipment point for cargo entering and leaving North Carolina by sea. Heritage tours showcase twentieth centuries homes, schools, churches, lighthouses, and life-saving stations. Drawing upon primary source historical documents, oral histories, archaeological and visual evidence, provides an analysis of the tangible and intangible signatures of this multicultural maritime landscape. Today these islands are dynamic coastal areas and fall within a high-risk category for erosion, coastal change and present a plethora of cultural resource management challenges. Developing documentation methodologies and techniques to collect tangible data sets was also part of the project to facilitate a national need in coastal cultural resource management.

Many thanks to the Program of Maritime Studies in the Department of History at East Carolina University for facilitating and supporting a variety of small field projects and a field school on Portsmouth Island from 2016 to 2019. Many M.A. students played a crucial role in data collection and site recordation, especially Ian Harrison, Kelsey Dwyer, and Ryan Marr. The project could not have been conducted without generous funding from the US National Park Service Preservation Training and Technology (PTT) Grant. Portsmouth island was one of several important case studies representing coastal heritage at risk on the North Carolina shoreline. Much appreciation to colleagues Thad Wasklewicz, Department of Geography, Planning and Environment and David Mallinson, Department of Geology, who played an important part in highlighting interdisciplinary issues, sharing expertise in new state-of-the art technologies as historic preservation tools, and introducing students to broader conceptual frameworks for collecting and analyzing data.