Introduction

Chapter 1 discusses the key concepts explored in this book: collaborative archaeology, Indigenous knowledge, and the clear connections between exploring the past and contemporary, living peoples. The chapter examines Nipmuc sites in the Hassanamesit Woods of Massachusetts. The lines of inquiry discussed include documentary research, ethnohistory, oral history and oral tradition, cultural landscapes, and cross-cultural epistemologies. The important connections between academic research and modern political processes for tribes (such as the federal acknowledgement process) are also discussed, as well as the outdated practice in archaeology of creating an artificial divide between “pre-history” and “history.” The decolonizing of archaeology is central to the approach used throughout this book and through the relationships that have developed between the authors over the past few decades.

The Cisco Homestead and Hassanamisco Reservation

Chapter 7 continues to explore the centrality of place to the continuation of Nipmuc culture and identity, and the concept of cultural landscapes, large and small. The important role that Nipmuc women who lived at the Cisco Homestead, such as Sarah Arnold Cisco, Sarah Cisco Sullivan, and Zara Ciscoe Brough, had in the preservation of this place is a focus of the chapter’s history about the homestead andHassanamisco Reservation in Grafton, Mass. The parcel on Brigham Hill Road in Grafton (which became the Hassanamisco Reservation) became the last parcel of tribally-owned land in the region following the sale of the parcel at Hassanamesit Woods. The decision to preserve this land base by women leaders of the tribe, beginning in 1857, became a defining moment in the formation of the modern-day Nipmuc Tribe. Without the preservation of this land and homestead, the tribe would not have continued as a distinct cultural group as it exists today.

Movement and the Nipmuc Landscape

This chapter combines an archaeological perspective with a broader consideration of Nipmuc residence to explore the cultural landscapes of a Nipmuc family in the Blackstone River Valley through the last decades of the colonial period and into the nineteenth century. It traces the lineage and movements of Sarah Robins and her descendants, also named Sarah, who maintained a connection to the Robin’s parcel (at the present-day Hassanamesit Woods trust property) until its sale in 1854. Time and movement are explored in this chapter through travels across Nipmuc homelands and across the centuries, as the author shares her explorations of the landscape through working on the site and regular travel between Providence, R.I. and Grafton, Mass. This is the same route several generations of Nipmuc people travelled through this valley because of their connections to these two places.

The Archaeology of Hassanamesit Woods

Chapter 5 shares the results of eight years of field work conducted at the Hassanamesit Woods Land Trust in Grafton, Mass., focused on the Sarah Burnee/Sarah Boston Homestead site on Keith Hill. The material recovered from the site dates to the eighteenth and nineteenth century occupations and demonstrates how this homestead functioned as a center of activity and gathering for the Nipmuc community. Loss of this parcel in 1854 provides one example of how land sales by this family (and others) over the generations resulted in dispossession of the tribal land base in Nipmuc homelands. The archaeology at this site contributes information about different dimensions of the Nipmuc community (such as occupational diversity) and emphasizes the contributions archaeology can make to the enrichment of Nipmuc historical narratives and of the present-day tribe, which has embraced learning more about this site and its occupants through the Hassanamesit Woods project.

The Documentary Archaeology of Magunkaquog

The sub-discipline of documentary archaeology is explored in Chapter 4. Layers of information about the Magunkaquog site and its inhabitants—and the story of Isaac Nehemiah, in particular—are revealed through analysis and interpretation of centuries-old primary documents connected to this site. This chapter unfolds around details surrounding the loss of Magunkaquog land through a controversial sale in 1715, granting it to Harvard College. Diverging interpretations of how this sale was perceived by the Native and Euroamerican peoples involved are explored. The documents reveal satisfaction among the Euroamerican men responsible for the sale and a clear sense of loss among the Native inhabitants (culminating in the death of a central figure at this settlement). The praying town period and effects of King Philip’s War are also discussed. Documents can reveal many details about the past, but must also be “read” in a deeper way to be better understood, and to help tell the more complex history of interactions between Native and European peoples of the past.

Rethinking Native Spaces

The concluding chapter recaps how Nipmuc spaces across southern New England tell stories through archaeology and documents that the authors have engaged in over the decades. Details about the individuals discussed in the chapters and their everyday lives—how they travelled, made a living, or what they used for dishware—and about important decisions that changed the course of events for Nipmuc people, individually or collectively, were shared. Loss of land was central to many of these stories. The chapter summarizes how the physical links between past, present and future—of histories that have futures—are revealed in the material culture, landscapes and documents researched for this book, and how the combined efforts of the ancestors discussed throughout the book mirror the work of the authors who tell their stories. Both have worked to ensure the survival of Nipmuc history into the future, the latter through this model of a decolonized and collaborative historical archaeology.

The Archaeology of Magunkaquog

Chapter 3 details the history of the Magunkaquog site from the features and material culture recovered through archaeological investigations in the late 1990s, combined with information from documentary records. With this site, the location of a seventeenth-century praying town meeting house, collaboration began between the archaeologists and the Nipmuc Nation. Certain practices revealed through archaeology conducted at this site provide clear evidence of a continuum between the post-contact inhabitants at Magunkaquog and their pre-contact cultural practices. Connections to other Native sites in southern New England also exist. Analyses of soils, ceramics, metals, glass, pipes, lithics, buttons and other artifacts provide a glimpse into the everyday lives of the site’s inhabitants 350 years ago as they encountered intense cultural changes with the arrival of John Eliot and other European settlers coupled with the adoption of European products into their lives.

Threads of Continuity

This chapter explores the long presence of Nipmuc people such as the Wabbaquasset tribe in southern New England for millenia. It reaches back into the pre-contact period and acknowledges the culture change of Native people in this region over time and up to the present. A central topic is the memorialization of places connected to historic figures such as John Eliot, combined with the erasure of Native people who have had connections to this landscape deep into the past, long before European colonization. The history of the praying town period and Christianization of Nipmuc Indians through the efforts of John Eliot in the 17th century and of the seminal King Philip’s War (or Metacom’s Rebellion), and its aftermath on Nipmuc people, are summarized.