Humans have inhabited the northeastern United States for approximately 12,000 years (Figure 1). During that period the vegetation of the region changed first from tundra to boreal spruce and fir forests. For the past 8,000 years or so, mixtures of pines, spruces, fir, hemlock, and a variety of hardwoods including beech, several oaks, maples, hickories, and birches have occupied the landscape. Changing climate and the differential migration of plant species were responsible for the vegetation changes that occurred over time periods spanning several hundred to a few thousand years (Davis 1983). Today we see a vegetation pattern that can be related to regional variations in climate, topography, soils, and human settlement. Alpine tundra is found at high elevations in the White Mountains, spruce and fir forests cover much of northern Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire, and pitch pine and oaks occupy the xeric, sandy soils of southern coastal areas. Mesic forest species occur over a broad area of central New England (Westveld et al. 1956).

Indian Fires in the Prehistory of New England

Chapter 5: Indian Fires in the Prehistory of New England

A stratigraphic study was undertaken to determine the historic role of watershed and sea—level changes on the development of Fresh Pond Marsh on Long Island's north shore. Pollen analytic, radiometric, and macrofossil techniques were aimed at differentiating among marsh, watershed, and regional changes over the last 1000 yr. A study of surface pollen distribution was conducted to determine pollen source and tidal influences on pollen deposition and to evaluate comparability of fossil pollen records from various intertidal environments. Regional and local inputs along a transect that included several tidal regimes were identified. Pollen counts from these different environments were comparable and proved useful for marsh reconstructions. Pollen analyses from the coastal marsh and a nearby lake distinguished changes in upland vegetation and cultural patterns within the watershed from those occurring regionally. Records of local pollen, foraminifera, macrofossils, rhizomes, and lithology indicated that the history of Fresh Pond Marsh has included periods of both tidal and freshwater conditions. Close dating control provided by 210Pb measurements and historically documented changes in indicator pollen taxa identified marsh responses to external influences, including dynamics of a baymouth bar, land clearing, agriculture, mosquito ditching, and sea—level fluctuations. Results showed that (1) tidal marsh sections can provide sensitive records of both upland and marsh vegetation histories, (2) pollen and macrofossil records can be closely linked to tide—gauge records and are responsive to short—term changes in sea level with a high degree of temporal resolution, and (3) upland influences can play an important role in determining the course of plant succession in the intertidal environment. Pollen provides the most sensitive record of marsh and upland development, as long as pollen source is accounted for.

The Development of a Tidal Marsh: Upland and Oceanic Influences

Ball, Margaret Haig Roosevelt Sewall (Ph.D., History) Grim Commerce: Scalps, Bounties, and the Transformation of Trophy-Taking in the Early American Northeast, 1450-1770 Thesis directed by Professor Fred W. Anderson Although most historians have evaded its study, postmortem mutilation had an extensive history on both sides of the Atlantic. Corporeal trophies communicated a variety of meanings to the people of Early America: mutilating a corpse conveyed affective power, marked physical and cultural boundaries between groups, and conferred spiritual authority. When European and Indian cultures met, these trophies formed an important aspect of their (mis)communication. Certain body parts acquired greater social and economic significance, developing into an exchange of human scalps for monetary rewards with dire implications for intercultural relations in North America. Colonial scalp bounties fused the “logic of elimination” with targeted violence. The rewards simultaneously produced racialized enemies and constructed whiteness as the unifying principle for people of the British (and later Amercian) empire who emerged from the Seven Years War as “the white people.” Nineteenth-century “image-makers” extended these semiotics into the language of a new American empire: an empire that defined its boundaries through racialized violence. 1 See: Daniel Bornstein, "The Uses of the Body: The Church and the cult of Santa Margherita da Cortona," Church History, 62, no. 2 (1993); Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: ReBurial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Vincent Brown, The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 2 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387-388. 3 Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007) 114-115. 4 Billington, Land of Savagery, used the phrase “image-makers” to refer to novelists, illustrators, journalists and others who helped construct the image of the West in American culture during the nineteenth century. To Daron and Auben; yes, Mommy’s done now.

Grim Commerce: Scalps, Bounties, and the Transformation of Trophy-Taking in the Early American Northeast, 1450-1770

The timing of crop introductions, particularly of maize (Zea mays), has been of long-standing interest to archaeologists working in various regions of eastern North America. The earliest confirmed macrobotanical evidence for maize in New York is A.D. 1000. We report on the results of accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) dating. phytolith analysis, and stable carbon isotope analysis of carbonized cooking residues adhering to the interior surface of pottery sherds from three sites in the northern Finger Lakes region of New York. Maize, squash (Cucurbita sp.) wild rice (Zizania aquatica), and sedge (Cyperus sp.) were identified in phytolith assemblages dating to as early as the first half of the calibrated seventh century A.D. The results demonstrate that low δ 13 C values on cooking residues cannot be used to preclude the possibility that maize was cooked in vessels. Two of the maize-bean-squash crop triad were present in New York at least 350 years earlier than previously documented, and the Northern Flint Corn Complex was present in New York by at least the first half of the seventh century A.D. This research highlights the potential of cooking residues to provide new insights on prehistoric plant-based subsistence.

Phytolith evidence for early maize (Zea mays) in the Northern Finger Lakes Region of New York

The traditional model for New York's coastal Algonquians assumes the development of sedentary life based on successful cultivation of maize beginning sometime in the Woodland period. Analyses of the archaeological, agronomical, and documentary evidence for maize, however, strongly suggests that productivity of this important cultigen was poor, limited, and of late most probably post-contact beginnings. It is therefore proposed that year-round village life first developed as a response to historic economic activities, such as wampum manufacture and European trade, rather than on a reliance on maize.

Maize Cultivation in Coastal New York: The Archaeological, Agronomical, and Documentary Evidence

Settlement pattern research in Coastal New York follows the philosophical structure of advances in method and theory in science. Two alternative paradigms for settlement pattern complexity are currently under debate with the traditional based on maize as the principal factor to promote or “allow” increased sedentism, and the new on the European fur-wampum trade. The history of the two paradigms is presented and five important issues are discussed and evaluated as supporting evidence: archaeological maize, pollen, soil, fertilizer, and settlement pattern models. The evidence appears to offer stronger support for the new. The major goal of this paper is to outline past and present archaeological research as a basis for future directions; it is also to serve as a rejoinder to Silver's (1980) comments on an earlier article of mine (1979) in this journal.

Lynn Ceci

Papers

Maize Cultivation in Coastal New York: The Archaeological, Agronomical, and Documentary Evidence

Method and Theory in Coastal New York Archaeology: Paradigms of Settlement Pattern

Squanto and the pilgrims