“Vacant Quarters” and Population Movements: Legacy Data and the Investigation of a Large-Scale Emigration Event from the Savannah River Valley to the Georgia Coast

Important methodological advances have led to the availability of high-resolution datasets relating to environment, settlement, and chronology in archaeological studies. Such advances in resolution can lead to new understandings, but they also create new issues. In this chapter, we discuss synthetic datasets and their utility in identifying and understanding large-scale population movements. We focus on the 14th and 15th century AD Savannah River Valley as a case study given its position as one of the earliest, synthetic explorations of the multi-faceted relationship between settlement, mobility, climate, and culture in the archaeological literature of the Eastern Woodlands. We begin by outlining some of the history of synthetic approaches to settlement and demographic analysis in Eastern North America and discuss how this tradition of study has successfully and productively made the leap to the digital realm in recent years, using the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) as an example. We then demonstrate how the types of data indexed by DINAA can be used to identify regional population shifts and investigate the demographic and social trajectories in play. This approach provides an alternative to traditional methods of identifying episodes of migration, such as the various analyses applied to artifact assemblages or to ancestral remains. Due to the nature of the archaeological record in this region, which we will return to, these more traditional analytical approaches are not always applicable or available. Using newly created digital datasets, we present evidence for a large-scale immigration to the neighboring coastal region of Georgia, using methods that we believe can be widely and productively applied elsewhere to document large-scale population movements.