Changes in the Land: Archaeological Data from the Northeast

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Changes in the Land: Archaeological Data from the Northeast," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this session, archaeological data are used to look at the changing circumstances in the human ecology of New England, looking at the land as Cronin did in colonial New England, but expanding that to include Native lifeways as well as Historic Period adaptations across the northeastern portion of North America. As Native groups interacted with the changing post-glacial ecological landscape, they evolved long-term techniques to survive and thrive, and at the same time altered the natural world around them. So too did the multiple ethnic groups that arrived to colonize this same landscape beginning in the seventeenth century. This session uses data primarily from heritage management projects in the Northeast to look backward at the landscapes described by William Wood and Henry David Thoreau, as well as those interpreted for the thousands of years preceding.