Hannah Hoover

I am a PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan with research interests in diaspora and placemaking during the early colonial period in the southeast United States. I received my B.A. in Anthropology and Classical Studies from Tulane University in 2018 where I completed an honors thesis about 16th-century Spanish forts in the southeast.

My dissertation research focuses on Yamasee towns in the Port Royal Sound of the South Carolina Lowcountry from 1685-1715. The Yamasee were a diverse, politically decentralized, and geographically dispersed Native American group who are perhaps most well known in popular history for instigating the pan-tribal Yamasee War against the British in 1715. The war vastly reconfigured the geopolitical landscape of the southeast in its wake and, more locally, shaped the emergence of plantation economies in the Lowcountry. 

My work seeks to understand how Yamasee towns were politically and socially constructed and connected during a twenty-year period leading up to the beginning of the war. This involves joining extant archaeological and historical data from numerous sites, collections, and archives with original fieldwork at the Yamasee primary town of Pocotaligo. I am particularly interested in applying a landscape histories approach to this work to recognize the longstanding Native occupation and use of this landscape as well as the region's enduring legacy of slavery.

I enjoy working with students and volunteers of all ages. If you are interested in getting involved with this research, please be in touch!