Objective
This project explores Anglo-Indigenous interactions in colonial New England via historical archaeology. It draws upon archival data collected on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean along with archaeological data collected from three sites in North America. Together these data offer the opportunity to investigate the complexities of cultural continuity and change in colonial contexts, to examine the long-term outcomes of such interactions for both colonizer and colonized, and to bring these patterns into dialogue with broader debates concerning social identity, cultural change, and post-colonialism. In terms of career development, grant funds will be used to complete two major parts of this research: 1) the publication stage of the first phase and 2) the data collection stage of the second.
The first phase concerns two archaeological sites: Brothertown, New York and Brothertown, Wisconsin. Each was home to the Brothertown Indians, a multi-tribal Christian Indian community who emerged out of the colonial tensions of eighteenth-century New England. Archival and archaeological data associated with each locale has already been collected, analyzed, and interpreted. Grant funds will be used for the publication stage of this portion of the research project and applied towards finishing a book on Brothertown archaeology and history slated for publication with the University of Arizona Press in late 2013.
The second phase concerns the Cochegan Site in Montville, Connecticut, an interethnic site occupied by both Mohegan Indians and English settlers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Cochegan Site marks a landscape of continual Mohegan-English interaction as it contains a sacred stone landscape—used by members of the Mohegan Tribe since the seventeenth century—and an English farmstead—owned and operated by the Baker family during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Funds will be used to continue a subsurface survey and excavation program begun in 2011.
Fields of science
Call for proposal
FP7-PEOPLE-2012-CIG
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Coordinator
LE1 7RH Leicester
United Kingdom