Shellfish Collection and Community Connections in Eighteenth-Century Native New England

Abstract

In recent years, the archaeology of Native American sites in colonial contexts has increased our understanding of how indigenous communities persisted in challenging times. Greater attention to practices helps to create a more enriched picture, especially when set in the context of food and consumption. This article considers shellfish remains excavated from three households on the Eastern Pequot reservation, located several kilometers Inland from the Connecticut coast in southern New England, to explore the role that shellfish gathering played in eighteenth-century subsistence and social practices in Native New England. Household variability in the specific species and quantity consumed, as well as disposal methods, provide insight into internal community decision making. Moreover, eighteenth-century reservation demographics strongly accentuate the role of women in the provision of these foodstuffs and in maintaining cultural connections to the coast and other off-reservation communities. Practices of gathering and consuming shellfish thus provide vectors of change and continuity in Native American communities of colonial New England, showing how these practices represent not only connections to a deeper past, but also ongoing and even resurging practices to engage with a colonial present.

Breaching Barriers: The Fight for Indigenous Participation in Water Governance

“…Food ways, for example, are one easily recognizable mode of connection between water and Indigenous peoples. Salmon, shellfish, and wild rice are frequently cited examples of Native foodways that are sensitive to water quality and depend on specific aquatic habitats [62][63][64]. In present-day North Carolina, the Lumbee River and its adjacent wetlands have long supplied Native peoples with fish, game, medicinal plants, building materials, and other resources [42].…”

Sampled to Death? The Rise and Fall of Probability Sampling in Archaeology

“…suggest that our samples are relatively representative” (Rick et al 2001:599). One article admits that three houses constitute a small sample but claims it is a “reasonable representative sample” of some unidentified population (Hunter et al 2014:716). Baseless assertions that samples are “representative” occur in 2.8 ± 0.4% of articles in Supplemental Text 4, but they are especially prevalent in JFA (6.8 ± 2.3%).…”

A requiem for hybridity? The problem with Frankensteins, purées, and mules

“…Since 2003, I have led a collaborative archaeological project with the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation to study their households and community existence from their installment on the reservation in 1683 to the 21st century (Silliman and Sebastian Dring, 2008). Excavations of several households from the mid-18th century to the mid-19th century have revealed material assemblages indicative of their engagements with the market economy via ceramics, glass, and metal goods (Silliman, 2009b; Silliman and Witt, 2010); their negotiations of food choices among wild resources and available livestock (Cipolla et al., 2007; Hunter et al., 2014; Williams, 2014); their architectural adjustments to incorporate framed-house building styles reminiscent of English and EuroAmerican settlers (Hayden, 2012; Hollis, 2013); their residence in what seem to be single-home farmsteads with field stone fences and piles rather than villages; their bodily adornment with a variety of objects such as glass beads, metal buttons, metal buckles, and glass paste jewels (Lewis, 2014); and their connections to stone tools through the curation of older objects, some knapping, and application of lithic technology to glass on a few objects. I use this case throughout this article to illustrate how and why hybridity fails to properly account for them, despite my initial optimism and the other postcolonial interpretive spins embedded in the project.…”