Mapping the People of Early America

FAIN: PW-259005-18

University of Georgia Research Foundation, Inc. (Athens, GA 30602-1589)
Claudio Saunt (Project Director: July 2017 to July 2024)

Completion of a database and Web platform mapping the settlement and movement of African, Native, and European populations in North America between 1500 and 1790.

The spread of Old World peoples across North America reshaped the continent and is a signal event in the making of the modern world, and yet we cannot picture the demographic revolution in any detail. Astoundingly, even after a century of professional scholarship on early America, the great transformation that remade the continent remains unmapped. Under the proposed grant, the Mapping the People of Early America Project intends to complete a population geodatabase representing early American peoples and to build a web platform that allows users to visualize and analyze the changing African, Native, and European populations in North America between 1500 and 1790. We expect that the data will become the base layer, literally and figuratively, for all future studies of early America, undertaken by humanists and environmental scientists alike. Scholars are sorely in need of this most essential of reference resources.