Exploring 12,000 Years of Occupation, Land Use, and Conflict: Archaeological and Historical Research Sponsored by the Mashantucket and Eastern Pequot Tribes

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gina Dezi. Kevin McBride.

The Calluna Hill Site (59-73) is a small Pequot Village burned down by the English allied forces during their withdrawal from the Battle of Mystic Fort. Recent excavations and metal detector surveys indicate the site was occupied for only a few weeks prior to its destruction on May 26, 1637. The site’s setting and faunal assemblage suggests the site was re-located away from the coast in anticipation of an English attack on Pequot territory. The artifact assemblage of re-processed brass and iron...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin McBride. David Naumec.

Conflict archaeology can offer a unique perspective into the nature and evolution of warfare in Native American and Euro-American societies in colonial contexts and how these societies shaped warfare and were in turn shaped by them. The Battlefields of the Pequot War Project, funded by the National Park Service American Battlefield Protection Program, seeks to move beyond documentation of battle-related objects associated with Pequot War battlefields and place the conflict in a broader cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Willison. Kevin McBride.

One of the most iconic moments of the Pequot War was the massacre at Mystic Fort, an event which occurred on May 26, 1637 and took the lives of hundreds of Pequot men, women, and children. Immediately following the massacre, the English retreated back to their ships and were followed by returning Pequot warriors. This paper will examine the native cuprous and ferrous objects recovered along various points of engagement on the English retreat route and analyze them in relation to metallic objects...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Silliman. Katherine Sebastian Dring.

We use this paper to take stock of more than 12 years of collaboration between the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation and the University of Massachusetts Boston in the context of the Eastern Pequot Archaeological Field School. This is important to discuss in a session dedicated to a broader Pequot archaeology, as the Eastern Pequot and Mashantucket Pequot nations share many cultural, historical, and familial connections, yet have had different political and economic positions and archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Kelly. Katharine Reinhart. Zachary Singer.

The Ohomowauke site (72-137), located on the Mashantucket Pequot reservation in southeastern Connecticut, contains a mid eighteenth-century Euro-American sawmill and associated domestic structures that would have been situated on the historic border of the reservation. While little remains of the sawmill, the cultural material recovered within and around the domestic structures, including the house of the mill operator’s family, provide an opportunity to examine the lifeways of a working class...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Mancini.

Between December 1773 and June 1774, a new road was surveyed and laid out across the Mashantucket Pequot Indian Reservation. Two survey points along this route, mention an “Indian meeting house” and a “small Indian house.” The construction of this road and the architectural landmarks along it illustrate, in part, the considerable adjustments that Pequots were making in the aftermath of colonization and land dispossession. Public architecture such as the “meeting house,” was unknown at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Singer. Brian Jones.

Multiple Paleoindian sites have been identified during the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center’s (MPMRC) long-term study of Paleoindian occupations around the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation. The recovery of multiple Paleoindian sites affords the opportunity to study Paleoindian lifeways around the Great Cedar Swamp at Mashantucket. This paper provides an overview of the Paleoindian research conducted by the MPMRC and attempts to reconstruct Paleoindian land use of the Mashantucket...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Bissonnette.

The Pequot War (1636-1637) destroyed infrastructure, resources and production, mobility, lines of communication and social networks that comprised a complex preventative health system for both native and colonial peoples. The destruction and change in physical and social environments and the disproportionate burden of conflict, for the purposes of this paper, is defined as colonial trauma. Physical and social stressors exacerbated disease that changed the course of colonial battles and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberly Kasper. Katharine Reinhart.

Often plants recovered from archaeological sites are not seen as keys to interpreting the agency associated with social contexts and cultural identities. Yet, the physical remains of plants left behind by individuals and communities, like other aspects of material culture, are the result of the choices made, completed actions, knowledge availability, and goals/strategies. This paper highlights and recenters traditional ecological knowledge of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe from 1000 to 1800 A.D....

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Farley.

This paper describes the results of four seasons of field research and laboratory analyses at Calluna Hill (CT 59-73), a small Pequot village burned during the English retreat from the battle at Mystic Fort, part of the 1630s Pequot War. The project uses environmental, spatial, and artifactual data from the site to undertake a study of culture change in southern New England’s contact period in order to better understand the role of intercultural exchange in colonial settings at the domestic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brianna Rae.

The Sandy Hill Site (72-97) was dug on the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation over the course of several years as part of large-scale, multi-phase cultural resource management (CRM) excavations. The site, which dates to the Early Archaic, produced a dense assemblage of quartz lithic artifacts, as well as thousands of charred botanicals and calcined bone fragments. Very few bifacial tools were recovered, which has led to the argument that this site may represent a southern manifestation of the Gulf...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Anderson.

Throughout the process colonialism many cultural traditions have been negotiated through the interactions of different sociocultural groups. One such tradition that was deeply affected was smoking. Tobacco, a staple product of the Americas, was returned to Europe by colonizers; this began a tobacco smoking revolution which spread clay tobacco pipes back to North America in the 17th-century. These instruments made smoking a more accessible and leisurely activity for Native American and European...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Salvatore Ciccone.

Prior to the devastating Pequot War of 1636, the Pequot people of modern day Connecticut were one unified nation. As a result of the conflict, there now exist two separate cultural groups, the Mashantucket Pequot and the Eastern Pequot. They experienced a trajectory throughout history that remained mostly parallel until modern times. My research examines some of their historic variations, particularly their architectural practices, and the timing of their transition to English-style framed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Jones.

The Mashantucket Pequot Reservation is today one of the best-researched heritage landscapes in New England. Cooperation between the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe and UConn archaeologists has been positive and ongoing since the early 1980s. Initial heritage management work on the Reservation focused on ethnohistorical research and the documentation of Pequot homesteads as well as important off-reservation historical sites such as Mystic Fort. Archaeological work was largely limited to extensive...