The Island Before the Island: Ten Thousand Years of Presence

For most of recorded European history, the story of Hilton Head Island begins with Captain William Hilton's visit in sixteen sixty three. But the island had been continuously inhabited for at least ten thousand years before that. Archaeological evidence, including shell middens and burial sites across the island, documents a long sequence of Native American occupation stretching back to the end of the last Ice Age.

The people the European colonists encountered in the early sixteen hundreds were the Escamacu, one of the Cusabo peoples, a coastal people whose language is poorly documented, who lived along the South Carolina coastal plain and Sea Islands. The Escamacu maintained villages on and near Hilton Head and used the surrounding waters and marshes for fishing, hunting, and gathering. When William Hilton arrived in sixteen sixty three, his account mentions encountering Native people and trading with them.

The island was inhabited. The Yemassee, another coastal people, were also present in the broader region and had dealings with the Spanish mission system to the south. The Yemassee War of seventeen fifteen to seventeen seventeen, in which the Yemassee and allied peoples launched a coordinated attack on English colonial settlements across South Carolina, broke the power of the coastal peoples and ended most Native presence along the coast.

Many Yemassee were killed, enslaved, or driven south toward Spanish territory in Florida. Others were absorbed into the Creek Confederacy. By the time English planters arrived in the seventeen twenties to claim land grants, the island's indigenous population was gone.

The shell middens they left behind are still being found today.