‘I didn’t realize the role rice played’: the ingenious crop cultivation of the Gullah Geechee people

By Adria R Walker, The Guardian

As a former deputy state underwater archaeologist, Mark Wilde-Ramsing can’t help but look down. While rowing around North Carolina’s Eagles Island, at the tip of the Gullah Geechee corridor, he noticed signs of human-made structures, visible at low tide. Though he’d retired, he was still active in the field and knew his former agency hadn’t recorded the structures – which meant he had come across something previously undocumented. The next step was figuring out exactly what he’d found.

Wilde-Ramsing knew the area had once been full of rice fields. His neighbor, Joni “Osku” Backstrom, was an assistant professor in the department of environmental sciences at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington whose specialty was shallow-water sonar, and he had the skills and technology to explore the area. Using a sonar device, the duo detected 45 wooden structures in the river, and the remote sensing tool allowed Backstrom and Wilde-Ramsing to acoustically map the canal beds.

“The side-scan sonar system that Mark and I put together and put on these vessels has been really important in finding these artifacts because if you went diving, you wouldn’t be able to see anything,” Backstrom said. “That’s really the advantage of this custom, shallow sonar system and being able to go up through these known rice canals and irrigation areas.”

Spanning 2,000 acres (809 hectares) of the northern end of Eagles Island, the 45 irrigation devices were developed by enslaved people, who would later come to be known as the Gullah Geechee. The devices were used to control water flow for the rice fields in conjunction with earthen dams and levees, Wilde-Ramsing said. Their existence provides further evidence of the engineering and technological skills that Gullah Geechee people used for rice cultivation, beginning in the late 1700s at the latest. Backstrom and Wilde-Ramsing documented their findings in a study published earlier this year. “The use of the island for this endeavor prior to the Civil War, in large part rested on the shoulders of transplanted and enslaved Africans and their descendant Gullah Geechee tradition,” the study reads.

Read more about the team’s discoveries.

The Gullah Geechee community has also gotten attention on Tiktok.

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