The Archaeological "Exceptionalism" of the Seventeenth Century: Myles Standish, James Deetz, and the Siren Song of Welsh Architecture

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Reinterpreting New England’s Past For the Future" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Myles Standish House Site in Duxbury, Massachusetts, is familiar to most historcial archaeologists through James Deetz’s 1977 publication In Small Things Forgotten. In it, Deetz highlighted the 1635 foundation ruins as the earliest systematic excavation of a post-contact period site in the United States and an important (and at that time) rare survival of a seventeenth-century “long house.” By 2000, Deetz had changed his interpretation, arguing that the foundation was the remains of a Welsh byre house “unlike any known from other archaeology, probate inventories, or surviving structures.” This claim was remarkable in its implications and, based on a careful reassessment of the site documentation, largely unsupportable. Deetz’s assertion, however, is important in that it highlights the theoretical maturation of historical archaeology by one its “founding fathers,” and the challenges of arguing for site “exceptionalism” in the face of more than 40 years of accumulated archaeological and historical data.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Reinterpreting New England’s Past For the Future   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 339