"The horrors of a wilderness with the beauties of a fertile nature are blended in our prospects at this place": Seneca Ecologies and Colonial Military Expeditions in 17th and 18th Century New York

Summary

The shifting settlement pattern of Haudenosaunee groups in what is today central New York state was intertwined with the political order on which the League of the Haudenosaunee was based. These entangled political and ecological practices produced a landscape of significant places and a unique ecology, which impressed European missionaries, travelers, and soldiers exploring this frontier. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries French and later American frontier military efforts were directed toward the destruction of not only Haudenosaunee settlements but also food and seed stores and standing crops—the means by which communities’ survived in and maintained this ecology. This paper focuses on the archaeologically and historically examined responses of Seneca communities, the westernmost member of the confederacy, to the Denonville campaign of 1687 and the Sullivan-Clinton expedition of 1779 and the ways in which physical and ideological appropriation of Seneca landscapes and ecologies was critical to colonial settlement and domination.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• The Interaction between Political and Ecological Frontiers

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16104