"to defend against any such weak enemies": Possessiveness and Layered Relationships at St. Mary’s Fort, Maryland

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Colonial Forts in Comparative, Global, and Contemporary Perspective", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Guido Pezzarossi (2018) has described colonial forts as “possessive,” in the sense that they were designed and implanted to stake claim to territory and control the movements of people into and around them. Yet for all their projected power, early colonial forts were perched precariously within lands rich with indigenous history, knowledge, and politics. The recent archaeological discovery of St. Mary’s Fort, built by the first wave of European colonists invading what they called Maryland in the spring of 1634, has revealed a fort intentionally designed to command local physical and social landscapes. This paper examines the architecture and emplacement of St. Mary’s Fort within the context of colonial intentions and emerging indigenous-colonial relations. It then details how the Maryland colonists’ attempts at “possessing” the landscape were complicated by those very relationships, ultimately resulting in the unraveling of diplomacy between colonists and the local Yaocomaco people.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Colonial Forts in Comparative, Global, and Contemporary Perspective   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow