"Even God Seemed to Hate North Carolina.": The Tuscarora as Middlemen During the Tuscarora War.

Abstract

Long before Europeans stepped foot on North American soil, the indigenous societies had extensive trade networks. As European settlements spread across the continent new opportunities for trade arose. Indigenous societies began to incorporate and adapt European trade goods into their trade networks. In North Carolina, for example, oral histories, ethno-historical accounts, and other studies indicates the Occaneechi and the Tuscarora functioned as middlemen. In the 1990s the excavated artifacts from the Fredricks site, near present day Hillsborough, were used by R. P. Stephen Davis Jr. and H. Trawick Ward to conclude the Occaneechi were in fact middlemen for the neighboring Sara people. Despite the extensive historical research available on the Tuscarora no archeological research to date has examined their role as middlemen similar to what was performed by Davis and Ward on the Occaneechi. This thesis compares the artifact assemblage from Fort Neoheroka, located near present day Snow Hill, with the assemblages from the Fredricks site and Upper Saratown. The assemblage from Fort Neoheroka was recategorized using Davis and Ward’s methodology. Using their “middleman pattern” on the Fort Neoheroka assemblage demonstrated strong parallels with the Fredricks site. That is to say, Fort Neoheroka, like the Fredricks site, had more European weapons than ornaments. The results of this study suggest that the Tuscarora were likely middlemen during the early eighteenth century.