An Analysis of Calluna Hill (59-73): Pequot Cultural Entanglement and Complex Consumption During the Pequot War

Summary

This paper includes an overview of the Calluna Hill site (59-73) in Mystic, Connecticut, a 1637 Pequot village burned down immediately after the English siege of Mystic Fort. The site offers the opportunity to explore important methodological and theoretical questions. Here I focus on the village as the location of intense intercultural exchange and cultural entanglement. Calluna Hill offers insights into the complex ways that the Pequot consumed European-made goods and participated in capitalist markets. It also evidences a significant amount of Pequot agency, as European-made objects are intermixed with traditionally native goods and object-forms. Of note are the ways that the Pequot people indigenized European-made materials, refashioning them into forms exclusively useful to them. Often these new objects took the form of traditionally native tools and objects. Pequots at Calluna Hill labored to transform the goods gained from Atlantic capital markets for intensely local purposes including the pursuit of subsistence, intercontinental trade, and warfare. Geospatial analysis and multivariate statistics are used to analyze multiple lines of inference relying on artifactual, spatial, archaeobotanical, and zooarchaeological datasets.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Markets and Capitalisms in Indigenous Societies in the Colonial Americas   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14618