The Impossible Heirloom: Lessons across One Hundred Generations of Nipmuc History

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Retelling Time in Indigenous-Colonial Interactions across North America" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

When Nipmuc leaders requested an archaeological study of an eighteenth and nineteenth century Nipmuc household in Central Massachusetts, our team set out to carefully situate this Indigenous family’s story within nested contexts: first, within contemporary Massachusetts history; and then within more regional and global happenings after the American Revolution. Indeed, archaeological findings confirmed a Nipmuc household entangled with ongoing local, regional, and global histories in dynamic ways. But we have always been flummoxed by the recovery of what appears to be a 3,000-year-old steatite bowl from a midden filled with refuse from the 1790s-1820s. Was there a mistake? Had we intruded on an earlier site? Had a member of the household stumbled upon this item, maybe while plowing the fields, and kept it at home? Maybe they made a steatite bowl, in an older fashion, in the more recent past? While all of these explanations were carefully considered, we ruled out the direct heirlooming of this object almost immediately. One object (even a stone one) couldn't be passed down through 100 or more generations. Right? In this paper, I revisit this assumption to consider the limits of our disciplinary temporalities and the multiple paces of Nipmuc time.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Retelling Time in Indigenous-Colonial Interactions across North America

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53212