ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews what is known about South Carolina’s prehistory and considers especially the indigenous contributions to the making of the state’s present-day landscape. Various peoples with different technologies have occupied South Carolina, and each group created its distinctive landscape and left its specific imprint. The millennia that constituted the prehistoric era witnessed a rich diversity of peoples and ways of life that created the pre-Columbian landscapes of South Carolina. The 1980 census recorded only a few thousand Native Americans living in South Carolina, many residents on or near the Catawba Indian Reservation in the northern part of the state or in small native communities. The prehistory of the United States has been studied intensively in most areas, but South Carolina’s prehistory has received much less attention through the years. The arrival of the Europeans in the sixteenth century marked a period of rapid and profound change for the Native Americans of South Carolina.
