Woodland Villages in the Upper Connecticut River Valley: Landscape-scale geophysics as evidence for large sedentary settlements in Northern New England

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The general absence of Woodland village sites within New England’s archaeological record has generated considerable debate and varied interpretations of past Indigenous subsistence-settlement strategies. In Northern New England, scholarship suggests this area was dominated by hunter-gatherers until the arrival of Europeans, indicating sedentary villages were rare and only located within Southern and Coastal New England. Locating villages or even individual house sites to address the accuracy of this hypothesis is challenged by poor preservation resulting from centuries of colonization and environmental conditions. After employing ground-penetrating radar (GPR), we successfully mapped cultural features along the Connecticut River Valley. These features include dense groupings of Woodland houses. Here, we reveal a dense archaeological landscape of sites within Northern New England and provide evidence to suggest the existence of larger villages in the region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41595.0