Kathleen Joan Bragdon's Contribution to New England Historical Archaeology: A Personal Assessment

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Over a career stretching nearly fifty years, Kathleen Bragdon produced a rich legacy of scholarship devoted principally to understanding the cultures of the indigenous peoples living in southern New England and the complexities attending their persistence. Bragdon's major accomplishments centered on the sophisticated ethnographic reading of the surviving public record left behind in the native language of the people proselytized by the Reverend John Eliot and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, a scholarship uniquely hers, combined with a constantly evolving understanding of the archaeological evidence relating to the indigenous groups residing in what became the states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Her contributions in this regard reveal a rare ability to incorporate archaeological data derived from both the research and regulatory contexts, with an up-to-date and innovative understanding of how meaningful social theory can inform the close approximation of past ethnographic reality.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow