The Brass Ankles of South Carolina were a "tri-racial isolate" group, as defined by anthropologists, that developed in colonial South Carolina and lived successively in the areas of Charleston, Berkeley, Colleton and Orangeburg counties as they increasingly migrated away from the Low Country and into the Piedmont and frontier areas, where racial discrimination was less. They were identified by this term in the later 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. They had a combination of European, African, and Native American ancestry.