Environment, Religion, and Social Change: the Doane Site Archaelogical Project, Cape Cod, MA

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "New Research on the “Old Colony”: Recent Approaches to Plymouth Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This paper provides a preliminary report on the 2019 excavations at the Doane Site, Eastham, Massachusetts, on Lower Cape Cod. This project looks at a well-known religious community in a less-clearly-understood time: the century and a half during which the descendants of those called “the Pilgrims” radically altered the landscape of the Lower Cape (present day Eastham, Orleans, Wellfleet, and Truro). This area was settled by Europeans starting in 1644 with the founding of Nauset (later Eastham), the only early town on the Cape settled by offshoots from the Separatist Plymouth community rather than Puritan Massachusetts Bay. This settlement was motivated in part by profit, but it was still a religious community, and they carried with them a view of the natural environment as a gift from God to be mastered, “improved,” and used.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• New Research on the “Old Colony”: Recent Approaches to Plymouth Archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 434