Culturally Significant Plants of the Piedmont Prairies along a Native American Trading Route

Prairies and open woodlands were once common throughout the Piedmont region of the Southeast, but are now predominantly extant in mowed roadsides and power-line cuts. It has been widely posited that pre-colonial land management practices – including the use of fire – played a crucial role in the maintenance of these habitats. However, to date this has not been shown quantitatively. To that end, we used published work identifying the location of the historic Indian Trading Path (a major Native American thoroughfare through the Carolina Piedmont in pre-colonial times), and georeferenced herbarium accession data for a suite of Piedmont prairie indicator species with Native American cultural value. We seek to quantify spatial correlation between the distribution of prairie species and the pre-colonial spread of Native American habitation.  If anthropogenic management practice had a habitat effect, we expect to see significant correlation between the locations of species accessions and the Trading Path.