Fanner basket

Wide, shallow fanner baskets were used to process locally grown rice by separating the grain from the chaff. It is a basket form brought from Africa to the Carolinas, together with the knowledge of rice growing, in the 1700s. Though today they are mostly decorative, they continue to reflect human-land relationships. According to Snype: “I used a thick grass called bulrush for the main part with pine needles in the middle and three inches of sweetgrass. The binding that holds the grass together is from the South Carolina state tree, called palmetto. Bulrush is found in the swamp and we use a machete to cut it. A lot of the materials are from the coastal area, but with development it’s becoming harder and harder to find some of these grasses.”