Where Are All the Woodland Villages of Vermont?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

There is a general absence of evidence of Woodland village sites (~900–1600 CE) in New England’s archaeological record. Due to a long history of colonization and environmental factors, even Woodland house sites, let alone villages, are incredibly scarce in the region. Despite that, many large village settlements appear within the early colonial ethnohistorical record. Some scholars suggest that settlements existed only in southern coastal New England, where dispersed mobile farmers dominated the interior. Others argue that sedentary villages existed beyond the coastal region, but evidence for them has been obfuscated. In order to address this debate, we have undertaken landscape-scale geophysical surveys in several areas of the Upper Connecticut River Valley. Using ground-penetrating radar, we have located multiple new house sites, helping resolve this debate and offering an alternative model for Woodland period settlement patterns in northern New England.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36990.0