Centuries of Colonialism in Native New England: An Archaeological Study of Eastern Pequot Community and Identity

University Of Massachusetts Boston, Dorchester MA

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation funding, Dr. Stephen Silliman will conduct a multi-year archaeological project focused on understanding Native American reservation communities in southern New England in the context of long-term colonialism. The project centers on a 225-acre reservation in southeastern Connecticut possessed by the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation and originally granted to their ancestors in 1683. Building on previous seasons of fieldwork on this mostly undeveloped reservation, the goals are to use a suite of archaeological datasets drawn from artifacts, animal bones and shellfish, plant remains, architecture, and landscape features to examine how this indigenous community maneuvered the complex economic, political, and social pressures placed on them by Europeans and Euroamericans between 1680 and 1880. That the community exists today is testament to their survival over the last almost 325 years, but what is not at all clear yet is the process by which their material, social, and lifestyle changes actually produced this kind of continuity. An ultimate goal is to use the research results to refine general anthropological understandings of such concepts as resistance and identity as they refract through colonialism. Written documents illuminate some parameters of Eastern Pequot life and offer insight into aspects of that process, but archaeological research is necessary to access the actual lived experiences in the home and across the reservation. Therefore, a primary objective for the archaeological research is to discover and test multiple households and associated features that span the two centuries following the establishment of the reservation. To accomplish this, the research design involves intensive mapping of visible surface sites, thorough subsurface survey strategies to detect hidden sites in a forested New England environment, moderate to full-scale excavation of relevant architectural and activity areas, and an array of analytical techniques in the research laboratory to extract more specific information from material culture, animal bones, plant remains, and chemical residues. In addition to its contributions to anthropological theory and empirical studies of New World colonialism, the project will have broad impacts in science education and collaboration. The project hinges strongly on student participation in field schools, laboratory projects, research positions, and master's theses. The collaboration creates a partnership with the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation that benefits long-term educational, research, and cultural/historic preservation goals for their community, while it simultaneously offers students the opportunity to participate in archaeological discovery and analysis, to think critically about archaeological methods and theories, and to explore collaboration with a Native American descendent community. In addition, the funded project offers training to historically under-represented groups (e.g., Native Americans) in scientific, archaeological research as it also insures that the archaeological project remains grounded in the complex realities of community life today. The project seeks substantial innovation in the collaborative realm because the future of North American archaeology may well depend on developing these relationships.