New Research on the “Old Colony”: Recent Approaches to Plymouth Archaeology

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "New Research on the “Old Colony”: Recent Approaches to Plymouth Archaeology," at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The research on the 17th-century Plymouth Colony in Eastern Massachusetts is foundational to the field of historical archaeology. For several decades, James Deetz and his students excavated, studied, and published on Plymouth Colony sites, but this work was then followed by a long gap in both new site discoveries and analytical work on the regional collections. In the past several years, there has been a renewed focus on Plymouth and the surrounding region: the discovery of new 17th-century sites; new analytical approaches to the study of curated collections; and consideration of a different set of research questions, such as the long-term effects of the colonial settlement and more recent development on the landscape and environment. This session presents the diverse aspects of this research in the context of revitalizing a regional research program on the Plymouth Colony.