Bridging the Divide: A Study of Fourteenth- to Eighteenth-Century Native Settlements in the Middle Chesapeake

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Deep History, Colonial Narratives, and Decolonization in the Native Chesapeake" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists (including the author) investigating seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Native sites in the Chesapeake point out how materially different these assemblages are from those recovered from contemporary colonial sites. Characterized by materials almost wholly produced by Native hands with some objects of European manufacture, they are indeed different and have been used to argue that Native people in a colonized land resisted colonial control in part through the maintenance of Native practices. These assemblages, however, are rarely examined vis-à-vis assemblages from earlier Native sites or from contemporary Native sites, resulting in a not-so-subtle reinforcement of the deep history/colonial divide along with the assumption that the template (the “norm”) for this period is the European colonial site.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Deep History, Colonial Narratives, and Decolonization in the Native Chesapeake

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33243