Cayce: Twelve Thousand Years on the Congaree
Near Columbia, South Carolina
The city of Cayce sits just across the Congaree River from Columbia, and it looks like a mid-size American suburb. But the ground beneath it contains one of the longest continuous records of human habitation anywhere in the southeastern United States.
The Manning Archaeological Site, on the south bank of the Congaree, has yielded evidence of human occupation stretching back roughly twelve thousand years, from Paleo-Indian encampments of the Ice Age's final centuries through the Archaic period, the Woodland period, and the historic era of the seventeen hundreds. Archaeologists have found projectile points, pottery, and structural remains representing culture after culture using the same favorable river terrace for the same fundamental reasons: reliable water, abundant fish and game, and a natural crossroads where trade paths converged.
In fifteen forty, the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto reached this part of the Carolinas. The Congaree people, who would give their name to the river and to the swampy floodplain forest downstream that is now a national park, lived along this stretch of the river.
By the late sixteen hundreds, English traders from the Carolina colony were working this river, recognizing the same strategic geography that indigenous peoples had understood for millennia. In seventeen eighteen, the colony built Fort Congaree on the site, a frontier garrison meant to anchor the British trading relationship with the Cherokee and Catawba nations and to control access to the great trade paths heading north and west. The fort also sat astride what may have been a portion of the Cherokee Path, the major indigenous trail network linking the coast to the southern Appalachians.
Fort Congaree was eventually abandoned, the Congaree people were decimated by disease and colonial warfare, and the place faded from broader attention. The coming of the railroad in the nineteenth century gave birth to the modern town. But under the subdivisions and rail yards, the stratigraphy of twelve thousand years of human decision-making remains.
