Hearth, Home, and Colonialism: Cultural Entanglement at Calluna Hill, a 1630s Pequot War Household

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Hearth and Home in the Indigenous Northeast" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper explores the nature of cultural change and continuity during the early colonial period (ca. 1615–1637), an understudied period in southern New England. The earliest years of intercultural exchange between Europeans and Native people in the region is believed to have brought sweeping disturbances to Native American lifeways; however, the nature and pace of those changes is little understood. The site of Calluna Hill (CT 59-73) is the location of a small Pequot village burned by the English during the Pequot War in 1637. The excavation of a domestic site from these earliest years after the arrival of Dutch traders and English settlers to Connecticut is exceptionally rare and offers us an opportunity to understand the complex and agentive ways that the Pequots adopted novel materials and ideas into their worldview. I use the theory of cultural entanglement to understand the direction and nature of cultural transformation in a period absent the asymmetrical power dynamics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I examine Pequot indigenization of materials and architecture to assess the ways that Pequots maintained long-standing practices to mitigate a fast-changing colonial environment.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Hearth and Home in the Indigenous Northeast

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33259