Hannah Hoover is an archaeologist and PhD candidate at the University of Michigan. She has been living in Beaufort for the past three years, conducting archaeological research aimed at understanding the small-scale, social dynamics of early 18th century Yamasee towns.

For millennia in the Southeast, US, Indigenous women provisioned their families as forager-farmers, organized familial and diplomatic relationships, lead their communities as spiritual and political leaders, and acted as agents of social continuity and change. In this talk, I discuss new archaeological and archival evidence for how Yamasee women shaped key colonial dynamics and events in the years leading up to the 1715 Yamasee War against the Carolina colony.