The afterlives of tidal rice landscapes

Commercial rice cultivation has ceased in these historic fields. Former field divisions remain visible, and water-control gates, known locally as trunks, still regulate flooding and drainage in some impoundments.

Enslaved Africans and their descendants supplied the knowledge and labor that transformed forested and tidal wetlands into rice fields. The resulting canals and embankments record both that environmental expertise and the plantation system that coerced the work and controlled its returns.

Some former fields remain managed as impoundments; in others, breached dikes have restored connections with adjacent rivers and tides. RICE compares these conditions to examine how the history of construction, cultivation, and maintenance continues to shape the movement of water and sediment.

A canal alignment, a buried soil, and a small difference in elevation record different parts of a rice field’s history. Elevation surveys and aerial mapping locate former canals and field divisions, allowing us to place a sediment core within the field’s water-control system. Establishing the age of a buried soil or sedimentary change allows us to relate it to the field’s history of flooding and drainage.

Changes in mineral deposition, organic matter, and salinity may help reconstruct a field’s environmental history, depending on what survives in the sediments. Measurements made at the surface answer a related question: how much material is accumulating, and how does that accumulation compare with changes in the wetland’s elevation? Keeping those measurements distinct helps us assess what is changing now alongside the longer record below ground.

Comparisons among managed impoundments, breached fields, and wetlands outside the impoundments test how inherited structures affect the timing and duration of flooding. Historical maps, plantation records, and archaeological survey help place those observations within the history of cultivation.

Maintaining a gate or allowing a breach changes how water enters a former rice field. Such decisions affect habitat and flooding while altering structures built through enslavement and sustained through generations of Black environmental knowledge.

RICE aims to provide evidence that wetland managers can use to assess these changes. Interpreting a field’s present ecological value also requires an account of how it was made, whose labor maintained it, and which histories remain visible as its management changes.

Oral and community histories can address experiences and knowledge that archival and archaeological records leave out. Descendant questions and observations can also shape the research and its interpretation, keeping Black environmental expertise visible in discussions of what these wetlands should become.