Think Small: What charcoal fragments and tiny sites teach us about indigenous land modifications and farming around Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island.

Summary

Are eye-witness descriptions in 1524 of extensive farming and intensive habitat modifications around Narragansett Bay by indigenous people just fantasies? Pollen evidence in now urban industrial Rhode Island remains unconvincing. To date, less than a dozen pre-Contact Rhode Island sites containing Zea maize have been found. This paper examines ongoing experiments with charcoal, particularly from RI 1898 – a tiny intact spot with a remarkably preserved stone tool manufacturing assemblage on the coastal edge – to evaluate broad questions about changing indigenous land use, deforestation and farming in a New England coastal setting.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage