Cultural Continuity in Southeastern New England: The Cultural Landscape of the Pokonoket Sites

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Power to the People: Cultural Resource Investigations along Utility Lines Giving a Voice to Past and Present Communities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent CRM investigations have shed new light on an area known to be an extensive Native American home site and cultural gathering place spanning back thousands of years to present day. The Pokonoket Cornfield Site in Dighton, Massachusetts, was first recorded in 1939 by avocational archaeologists who described it as being “a large habitation site of indefinite size.” Diagnostic artifacts suggested the site was occupied at least during the Late Woodland and Contact periods. Along the edge of the cornfield, a large oak tree known as “the Council Oak” is known to have been a seventeenth-century meeting location for King Philip (Metacom) and his Wampanoag warriors during the King Philip’s War (1675–1676). Investigations conducted within the site and surrounding vicinity by the Public Archaeology Laboratory Inc. (PAL) for a proposed transmission line project recovered evidence to suggest an earlier occupation of the Pokonoket Cornfield site as well as a Middle Archaic occupation of an adjacent hilltop, designated the Pokonoket Hilltop site. New data from the Pokonoket Hilltop and Pokonoket Cornfield sites contribute to the extensive record of Native American occupation of the Taunton River drainage basin dating back at least 8,000 years to the present day.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Power to the People: Cultural Resource Investigations along Utility Lines Giving a Voice to Past and Present Communities   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40431.0