The Complexities of Consumption: Eastern Pequot Cultural Economics in Eighteenth-Century New England

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

“…In contrast to the Late Woodland year-round, winter dominated harvesting pattern (Bernstein 2002;Lightfoot and Cerrato 1988), Site 102-126 showed a strong pattern of summer harvesting for soft-shell clams (see Hunter 2012 for a discussion of shell thin-sectioning and seasonality analysis). This parallels the pattern in which Native American men tended to work off the reservation in spring through fall for local merchants and in local militias, while falling off merchant and militia rolls in the winter (Silliman and Witt 2010). Therefore, the prevalence of summer shellfish harvesting coincided with these periods of increased male absences, perhaps tying shellfish gathering to gender dynamics and practices on the reservation.…”

“…This focus also requires more attention to "middle periods" that provide critical temporal and cultural links between the earliest colonial contexts and the contemporary world of Native America today. This point has been argued by Lightfoot (2006) and can be illustrated by the recent work being done on the market economies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Greene and Plane 2010; Silliman and Witt 2010).…”

“…Of particular note is the high level of shellfish consumption at several sites during the late eighteenth century, which coincided with periods of external and internal change and conflicts including both the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. During these conflicts, significant numbers of Native American men served in colonial militias (Den Ouden 2005:70-71;Mandell 2007;Silliman and Witt 2010). The subsequent effect on reservation dynamics likely played a role in subsistence needs and may have contributed to the short-term, intensive harvesting of shellfish seen in certain reservation deposits.…”

“…"For Native communities in eighteenth-century Connecticut, reservations were embattled spaces, but they were also the locus of community regeneration" (Den Ouden 2012:3). Community residents continued to file petitions to the colonial and then state governments about land encroachment and overseer problems, and they continued to occupy their reservations for centuries with a range of houses and material goods that indicated their persistence and their participation in the local and global economies (Hayden 2012;Silliman 2009; Silliman and Witt 2010).…”

Reservation Subsistence: A Comparative Paleoethnobotanical Analysis of a Mashantucket Pequot and Euro-American Household

“…This implies that there was a greater breadth of local collected food plants at the European American household. Although it is unlikely that the reservation household was ever abandoned altogether, it is possible that its labor gaps (Silverman 2003;Mandell 2008: 27-34 Silliman andWitt 2010). Taxonomic richness, which is an absolute count of the number of unique taxa recovered, may help validate historical accounts of Mashantucket laborers and their tendency to be away from the reservation for long periods of time.…”