The Dualities of Endurance: A Collaborative Historical Archaeology of Ethnogenesis at Brothertown, 1780-1910

The Brothertown Indian community formed in the late 18th century when segments of several tribal groups from coastal northeastern North America broke away from their home settlements to move west together. What united the community was a shared belief in Christianity, a dedication to practices of agriculture, and hopes of escaping the land politics and corrupting influences of colonial culture on the East Coast. This dissertation investigates the ethnogenesis, evolution, and endurance of the Brothertown Indian community from the perspective of collaborative historical archaeology. In doing so, it aims to reassess theories of culture, identity, and discourse in the modern postcolonial world, and to incorporate archaeological data into the study of Brothertown history. In order to accomplish these goals, this dissertation analyzes historical documents, cemeteries, and settlement patterns using theories of practice and pragmatics. The results of these analyses reveal the ways in which several tribal groups joined together to form a new type of Native community and negotiate colonial politics, specifically the roles that linguistic, material culture, and spatial discourses played in these processes. Certain discourses challenged dominant schemes of social classification, obfuscating categories such as “Indian” and “White,” but also had pragmatic impacts within the Brothertown community that shaped memory processes, conceptions of personhood and identity, and overall communal structures. This study concludes that instances of ethnogenesis hinge upon insiders and outsiders continually negotiating social boundaries via words, things, and spaces. It rejects dichotomous frameworks of cultural change that classify materials and practices solely in terms of their origins for more complex considerations of the long-term, pragmatic results of such entanglements

Negotiating Boundaries of Colonialism: Nineteenth-Century Lifeways on the Eastern Pequot Reservation, North Stonington, Connecticut

The processes of colonialism involve the selective adoption of the foreign along with the recasting of the traditional. Native American participation in these processes is popularly downplayed in recounts of colonial pasts, portraying Native American peoples as docile and malleable - unable to resist assimilation into the “dominant” European colonist-culture. In 17th-century Connecticut, European colonists officially declared Pequot peoples extinct with the Treaty of Hartford after murdering and selling the majority of Pequots into slavery. Despite this, Pequot peoples persevered and returned to their homelands, forcing colonists to “give” them reservation lands in the mid- to late-17th century. The Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation reservation was officially established in North Stonington Connecticut in 1783. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Euroamerican encroachers began to call Eastern Pequot authenticity into question in attempts to appropriate tribal lands for pastureland and colonial development. The archaeological record from this time period speaks to Eastern Pequot identity and habitus and paints a picture of Eastern Pequot peoples as agents of change, constantly negotiating their places within colonial structures. This work adheres to a model of colonialism that is more complex than accultuationist perspectives that simplify colonialism as a mono-directional process with the “dominant culture” infusing into and over the “passive”, leaving no traces of the latter. Zooarchaeological analyses of two household assemblages on the Eastern Pequot reservation open windows into the everyday lives of Eastern Pequot peoples living on the reservation in the early 19th century. The faunal remains attest to the hardships of reservation life and the maintenance of an Eastern Pequot ethnic identity. Meat sources were processed intensively and shared between household groups. Furthermore, traditional practices such as non-metal tool use and bone smashing tied 19th-century Eastern Pequot peoples to their common pasts and, in turn, to each other. By adhering as a community and maintaining ties to their pasts while at the same time changing with the times, Eastern Pequot agents actively negotiated their places within the political and social climate of 19th-century Connecticut

The View From Watery Places: Rivers and Portages in the Fur Trade Era

On the drive northward from the Twin Cities on the straight and flat road of I-94, and then Minnesota’s Highway 10, the landscape of urban and suburban development slowly cedes to wide open fields and scattered towns, sometimes lined with rows and patches of trees. This is not the most exciting or scenic of drives, but it’s exciting to us nevertheless, because this is the way toward another season of archaeological fieldwork on a late eighteenth-century fur trade post located on the Leaf River in Wadena County

Posthuman Archaeologies, Archaeological Posthumanisms

This paper maps and builds relations between posthumanism and the field of archaeology, arguing for vital and promising connections between the two. Posthuman insights on post-anthropocentrism, non-human multiplicities, and the minoritarian in the now intersect powerfully with archaeology’s multi-temporal and long-term interests in heterogenous and vibrant assemblages of people, places, and things, particularly the last few decades of ‘decolonial’ re-imaginings of the field. For these reasons, we frame archaeology as the historical science of posthumanism. We demonstrate the discipline’s breadth through three vignettes concerning archaeology’s unique engagements with multiplicities of objects, multiplicities of scales, and multiplicities of people. These examples, we argue, speak to the benefits of becoming posthuman archaeologists and archaeological posthumanists