A similar blend of persistence amidst change marked the upcountry Indians' response to European technology, the second important innovation introduced from abroad after 1525. The manner in which these unfamiliar wares found their way into the hands of upcountry Indians remains unclear. The first trickle of material goods must have appeared in the sixteenth century. European explorers routinely passed out gifts--a knife here, a metal cross there, some beads further on--to ease their passage through Indian territory, and some of these prized possessions probably ended up among more distant communities (Lewis and Loomie 1953:111). Some natives were not content to wait. In 1609, for example, Indians living along the Santee River had already made their way north to Jamestown and returned home bearing hatchets, knives, and biscuits made of wheat flour (Barbour 1969:312). Future archaeological research may reveal whether other curious natives from the Carolina interior made a similar trek and were similarly rewarded.
As trade with Virginia developed during the mid-seventeenth century, the pattern of exchange became clear. Each Piedmont settlement went through two distinct stages in its growing acquaintance with new technology, stages that even a novice like John Lederer recognized and that have been tentatively confirmed by recent archaeological work. The first step, which Lederer reported among the "remoter Indians" and archaeologists have found at Upper Saratown, was marked by a certain native naivete about the range of merchandise available from Anglo-America. These people were happy to barter for "trinkets" such as mirrors and pictures, glass beads and bracelets, knives and scissors, "and all manner of gaudy toys and knacks for children" (Cumming 1958:42). The archaeological portrait of Upper Saratown matches Lederer's description closely. This Sara village, filled with beads and "trinkets," was virtually devoid of European weapons or other metal goods (Wilson 1984).
A potsherd found at Upper Saratown with the outline of a musket etched into it by some unknown native artisan hints at a growing awareness of the material cornucopia available from Europeans and may signal the beginning of the second phase of a people's relationship with an alien material culture. Lederer found that "neighbour-Indians," more experienced in the art of intercultural exchange would not be satisfied with "trinkets." They demanded not only knives and scissors but also arms and ammunition, not only beads and bracelets but cloth, axes, hoes, "and all sorts of edg'd tools" (Cumming 1958:41). By the end of the century, Indians throughout the Piedmont were behaving like "neighbour-Indians." At the Fredricks site, the probable location of the Occaneechi town Lawson visited in 1701, archaeologists have uncovered an inventory of goods quite unlike that at Upper Saratown, occupied a generation earlier. Inhabitants of the Fredricks site possessed muskets and pistols, glass bottles and metal pipes, iron axes and pewter porringers--in short, they were more thoroughly integrated into the colonial trade system (Dickens et al. 1984:27-39; Wilson 1984).
It is easy to exaggerate the changes wrought by this deepening involvement in inter-cultural exchange. In fact, whereas European goods and colonial intruders were certainly novelties, traders and trade were not, and Piedmont natives fitted the new men and the new merchandise into established patterns of exchange and existence. Archaeological evidence demonstrates that Indians in the interior had long traded with their coastal neighbors for a variety of items (Merrell 1982a:22). Some of that trade remained wholly untouched by the growing colonial presence. In Lawson's day, for example, towns along the coast still gathered yaupon plants (from which Indians brewed the ceremonial "black drink") and sea shells, carried them inland, and swapped them with "remote Indians" for a root that grew near the mountains and was used to make red paint (Lefler 1967:98, 218, 174).
With the structure of exchange so well established, Indian traders living near the English could easily begin to add new products to the supply of merchandise they hauled into the upcountry. In 1670, John Lederer met some Sara traders at a village along the Catawba River (Cumming 1958:31). Since the Sara were in touch with Virginians around that time (Wright 1966:400), it seems likely that some of the goods they carried were of European manufacture. By the time Lawson passed through, this trend was clear: coastal Indian traders were peddling everything from stolen horses to jugs of liquor in Piedmont villages (Lefler 1967:44, 54, 232).
Colonial traders gradually supplemented, then supplanted, the native middleman, but they still had to fulfill Indian expectations by conforming to local codes of conduct (Merrell 1982b:5-7) and satisfying their hosts' taste in trade goods. Despite the new and wonderful products a Virginia trader dangled before their eyes, natives insisted that he also bring goods traditionally carried past the Fall Line from the lowcountry. "This yeere [1682] the Indyans will have Roanoake," complained Cadwallader Jones, a colonist heavily involved in the Piedmont trade, "not with standing all other com[m]odities be p[re]sented. . . . I having at this time a considerable parcell of other goods amongst them unsold" (Great Britain, Public Record Office, Colonial Office, Series 1 1682:48:115-116). In 1691, William Byrd I, another businessman active in the uplands, also complained that the Indians wanted shell beads more than anything else (Trinling 1977:163). The natives' insistence on acquiring shells may explain a curious shift in the types of shells found at Piedmont villages in the Historic period (Sizemore 1984). The Fredricks site contained shells from northern shores, and it seems likely that these items arrived there on the backs of colonial packhorses, for colonial traders often looked northward for the supplies Indians demanded. In 1671 John Lederer received a commission from Maryland's Lord Baltimore to trade with natives in the Southern Piedmont (Cumming 1958:99-100). A decade later Cadwallader Jones also looked to Lord Baltimore, begging Maryland's Lord Proprietor to grant him permission to collect shells along the colony's Eastern Shore (Great Britain, Public Record Office, Colonial Office, Series 1 1682:48:115-116). And a decade after that, William Byrd I went even further afield, writing the governor of New York to ask that he send some shell beads to be passed along to Carolina natives (Trinling 1977:163). The source of supply had changed; native tastes had not.
Piedmont inhabitants were no less selective in the European wares they did purchase. To his dismay, the colonial trader learned that Indians would not accept every item he happened to have on hand. Dark blue cloth sold best, as did larger hoes and smaller glass beads. But not just any beads: villages west of Virginia wanted blue and red ones, those to the south, black and white (Trinling 1977:30, 41, 57, 64; Ewan and Ewan 1971:385). Why? The colonist either did not know or did not say. He knew only that such idiosyncrasies could spell the difference between profit and loss.
Those items natives did accept were grafted onto existing ways. Some were simply substitutions of European for aboriginal manufactures. Indians happily donned cloth instead of deerskins, painted their faces with vermillion rather than cinnabar, became expert marksmen with a musket as well as a bow, dug graves with iron rather than stone tools (Ward 1984b), and adorned themselves and their dead with glass beads as well as shells. At other times they reshaped an item to suit themselves. Lawson reported, and archaeologists have since confirmed, that Piedmont men fashioned arrowheads from broken glass bottles (Lefler 1967:63; Charles 1983:31). Meanwhile, the women might take a copper kettle and cut it up to make into ornaments, or an Indian fortunate enough to obtain a horse used the animal in ways that made an Englishmen cringe. The Saponi headman proudly showed Lawson "2 of his Horses, that were as fat, as if they had belong'd to the Dutch Troopers." Natives never rode these creatures, and scarcely ever used them as beasts of burden, preferring instead to keep them as status symbols and stuff them with corn like some pampered pet (Lefler 1967:54, 44).
The merchandise Indians gave in return for all of these European goods further strengthened attachments to past ways, for each was firmly rooted in aboriginal skills. The cane baskets William Byrd's men brought back from Piedmont towns were products of a long craft tradition among women there, a tradition flourishing in de Soto's time (Ewan and Ewan 1970:384; Varner and Varner 1951:313, 315-316). Similarly, the deerskins that made up the bulk of a colonial trader's return cargo entailed no radical departure from previous modes of existence. Deer were already a vital part of everyday life, and Indians were adept at stalking, killing, and processing the animals. Even the occasional Indian slave that Virginians brought out of the interior required no revolutionary reversal of customary ways. Piedmont warriors had habitually captured enemy Indians for adoption, torture, or servitude. This reservoir of outsiders could now be tapped to supply colonial demands, and replenished by new forays against traditional foes (Merrell 1982a:78-80).
In short, neither the wares Piedmont folk acquired nor the articles they handed over in exchange revolutionized their lives. It is therefore not surprising to find traditional patterns of belief and behavior intact despite heavy engagement in intercultural trade. Historic sources and archaeological evidence agree that routine subsistence practices did not break down despite the time Indians devoted to the trade. Natives had added peaches to their repertoire of foodstuffs, but otherwise a Piedmont Indian in 1700 ate much the same dishes as his ancestors a century or two earlier (Lefler 1967:24, 35, 115-116; Ewan and Ewan 1970:376; Wilson 1977:83, 115-116; Ward 1980:196, 198; Johnson 1984). Young men still helped with planting, women still tended the crops and gathered wild plants, hunters still went out for food as well as deerskins, bringing back turkey as well as venison (Lefler 1967:17, 31, 34-35, 59, 177). Nor had the demands of the trade wrenched people free from the ancient system of values. A hunter stalking deer to sell the hides to colonists was no less eager to propitiate the gods than his ancestor (Lefler 1967:58). And when that hunter died, his possessions--even the coveted musket--went with him into the earth and the afterlife rather than being passed on to his kinfolk as people with European notions of property would have done (Dickens et al. 1984:35, 49).
Thus the threads binding upcountry Indians to the past remained unbroken by the steady expansion of trade with colonists. Nonetheless, the evidence of cultural persistence cannot altogether obscure signs of profound changes set in motion by the trade. The most obvious of these changes was alcohol, one European product Indians could not easily incorporate. Lawson ranked it with smallpox as a killer (Lefler 1967:232). While exaggerated, his assessment does point to the havoc created by a keg of rum. Indians would sell all they possessed to acquire it, would not stop drinking until completely intoxicated, and then, freed of customary restraints, proceeded to maim or kill themselves and their townspeople (Lefler 1967:18, 184, 211, 240). According to Lawson, inhabitants of the interior had only recently become acquainted with liquor (Lefler 1967:232). If so, they quickly learned how destructive it could be and took steps to combat it. By 1712, the Saponi were petitioning Virginia authorities to prohibit the sale of liquor to Indians, an appeal repeated many times with no real effect (McIlwaine 1928:312-313). Officials in Williamsburg proved as helpless to stop colonists from selling it as native headmen were to prevent their people from purchasing it (Wright 1966:315).
Alongside the obvious addiction to alcohol was a more subtle, more pervasive, and ultimately more destructive addiction to European technology in general. The erosion of ancient craft skills, virtually undetectable at the time, is clear in the archaeological record, as arrowheads and clay pots became cruder in design and clumsier in execution with the passage of time (Lewis 1951:310; Coe 1964:49-50; Trinkley and Hogue 1979:11). This ominous development meant that Indians were steadily becoming more dependent upon fresh supplies of European merchandise, a dependence that left them at the mercy of distant markets and unknown forces.
The shifting Piedmont settlement pattern also leaves subtle clues of the growing importance of trade. With the exception of the Tutelo and Sara, by 1701 all of the remaining Piedmont groups had chosen to settle astride the principal trail from Virginia to the populous Catawba River towns, the better to waylay itinerant colonial traders headed to those lucrative markets. Between the time Lawson passed through and the publication of his book eight years later, all of these peoples had taken another important step down the road to dependence, leaving the upcountry to bypass middlemen like the Tuscarora and get closer to their colonial suppliers. The Sara and others moved south into unfamiliar terrain along the Pee Dee River to establish a trade connection with Charleston (Anonymous 1715?). The Saponi, Occaneechi, and Tutelo chose to forget their old quarrels with Virginia, and they settled along trading paths on the colony's southwestern frontier where they had easy access to the colonial trading community (Cumming 1958:16, 22; McIlwaine 1928:188, 196, 296, 566).