Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Life and Death at Brothertown, An Archaeology of Endurance

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

The main objective of the Brothertown Project (a collaboration between Craig Cipolla and the Brothertown Indian Nation) is to explore the processes by which the Brothertown Indians negotiated their identities between the 18th and 20th centuries. During this period, the Brothertown Indian community embraced Christianity, adopted the English language, and consumed an abundance of mass-produced non-Native material culture. The project proposes, first, to examine the changing burial practices implemented by the Brothertown Indians as an index of the community's shifting identity. Second, to investigate the residential and land-use patterns that contributed to this changing identity. To accomplish these objectives, the Brothertown Project will map all known Brothertown cemeteries in New York and Wisconsin, catalogue all gravestones found within, and use ground penetrating radar to detect unmarked graves. In addition to the cemetery analysis, historic maps of the Brothertown settlements will be analyzed in terms of spatial distributions of individual and family plots. The comparison of these patterns with the spatial distributions of graves in cemeteries will offer insights into the ways that lived spaces and cemetery spaces related to emerging social distinctions within the community. The proposed activity has specific intellectual merit for historical archaeology and cemetery studies. This project makes use of several new methods and theoretical approaches. First, instead of focusing only on gravestone iconography, it takes the entire cemetery into account as a unit of analysis. This includes stone sizes, shapes, and materials along with overall spatial layouts. These additional lines of evidence expand on classic approaches to graveyards in historical archaeology and elsewhere. Second, this study compares cemetery and residential patterns in order to gain new links between Brothertown in life and Brothertown in death. It is anticipated that such a comparison will offer new perspectives by juxtaposing these two distinct types of spaces, linking the everyday life of the Brothertown community to the cemeteries that commemorated their ancestors and their pasts. Those that formed the Brothertown community in the 18th century were mostly literate in the English language. The rich documentary record associated with Brothertown is rare in terms of Native American histories which are typically based on oral and ethnohistoric records. In terms of the anthropology and archaeology of indigenous peoples in colonial and postcolonial contexts, the "insider" perspective that the Brothertown context allows will likely shed light on the complexities of colonial and postcolonial social negotiations and it will certainly allow for more nuanced interpretation of the cemetery and residential patterns under analysis. In the broadest sense, this project will be of interest to anthropological and other social scientific studies of material culture and mass consumption as it explores the social transitions one particular community went through as it transformed its commemoration practices to incorporate mass-produced gravestones. The proposed project is also important for the Brothertown Indian Nation and many non-indigenous residents of historic Brothertown, Wisconsin as it will act to preserve historic information contained on gravestones and increase public awareness of local histories.