Seas of Change: Overfishing and Colonial Encounter in the Gulf of Maine

Summary

This paper looks at the story of the colonization of New England from the perspective of the Ocean. It was the Ocean, and its marine resources, that first brought Europeans to the Northwest Atlantic and into contact with the region’s indigenous communities in the 16th and 17th centuries. As Europeans expanded their colonial presence on land, they likewise expanded their presence on the sea, increasing commercial fishing in the Northwest Atlantic. During this early colonial period, New England colonists valued the ocean as a commercial highway, a rich source of commodities, while also fearing it as a place that could display God’s Providence directly to men. Indigenous communities had a well-developed relationship with the ocean based on millennia of subsistence-level resource extraction (non-commercial) and they appreciated the ocean and its marine resources within their traditional religious frameworks (including as animate). In this paper, we explore how indigenous communities at one local maritime site in the Gulf of Maine, the Seabrook Site, were impacted by the views of the ocean developing among European colonists during the 1600s, how this changed their physical relationship with the ocean, and how they expressed internal conflicts about changing relationships in material culture.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Worlds Forever Changed: The Impact of Conflict and Colony in the "New World"   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage