by Dr. Alex F. Ricciardelli, Director of the Haffenreffer Museum
of Anthropology and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brown
University.
This monograph represents the only extensive ethnography we have of
the Wampanoag Indians and provides us with the best understanding
available of Massasoit and his people at the time they occupied the
coastal areas of southern New England. The author has consulted all
the known historical sources and arranged the material into a series
of topical categories which will serve as a handy reference to the
literature. Useful also are the author’s comments regarding those
parts of Wampanoag culture about which we presently have no knowledge.
Southern New England has been one of the neglected areas in the
anthropology of North America. This seems strange when one considers
that the oldest museums and departments of anthropology in the United
States are located here. The usual explanation seems satisfactory
enough at first glance: there has been no extensive record of
anthropology in southern New England because there are no subjects
for study. The indigenous people were among the first to experience
the ravages of contact with European colonists. Disease, war, and
forced migrations throughout the 17th and 18th centuries effectively
depopulated the area of most of its original inhabitants. Those
few who remained were supposedly detribalized and merged with the
Europeans. Even their artifacts were carted off across the ocean to
be placed in cabinets of curiosities. To this day some of the best
and largest ethnographic collections of New England Indian material
culture are found in European museums and private estates. Further,
Colonial towns were located on prehistoric and early historic Indian
camps and villages, and in other ways the growing industrial complex
of the Northeast covered over or erased the Indian sites. As a
result, at the end of the 19th century, when anthropology as a formal
discipline emerged, the native peoples and most of the material
vestiges of their presence were gone.
There is undoubtedly much truth to this explanation, but one must
also examine the history of anthropology in order to understand
the reasons for this relative neglect. Shortly after the turn of
the century, the subjects anthropologists were seeking inevitably
led them westward to the Plains, the Southwest, and other places
where the frontier had only recently passed. Anthropology at that
time meant studying peoples who still retained, or at most had only
recently lost, their tribal organization. Tribal societies were
rapidly disappearing and it was crucial that anthropologists bend
all their efforts to creating a record of these peoples’ cultures
before they were irretrievably lost. The small groups of surviving
Algonkian Indians in southern New England, who retained few visible
evidences of their traditional culture, therefore attracted almost no
attention. Frank G. Speck is a notable exception among the younger
anthropologists who were prominent in shaping the discipline in the
United States.
The practice of anthropology today is considerably different from the
anthropology of 70 years ago. Tribal cultures and societies which
are still relatively intact continue to be an important concern,
but new dimensions for the study of man have appeared. These new
developments make southern New England an important resource for
anthropological study. Inter-ethnic relations are now attracting the
attention of students to a society which is no longer considered an
inevitable melting pot. Portuguese, French-Canadians, Italians, and
other immigrants have been a prominent part of New England towns and
cities for decades, but we do not yet understand the processes by
which they have adapted to American culture. These ethnic segments
include the Wampanoag and other Indian groups who have retained their
Indian identity after over 300 years of intensive contact. They
obviously represent an important phenomenon for study. Many Indian
groups are now moving to large cities, including Boston, and some
anthropologists are trying to understand how tribal peoples adapt to
urbanism as a way of life.
Ethnohistory, the writing of ethnographies from historical documents,
is another relatively new way of practicing anthropology. Although
the source materials for southern New England are not as rich as
those from other areas in North America, there is still a great
deal which can be mined from them. Early colonists traded, fought,
and proselytized the Indians and the accounts and records they left
contain many possibilities for studying cultural processes. We are
learning that the value of documents as source materials is as much
a function of their ability to answer the kinds of questions that
intrigue us as it is a matter of bulk.
It is true that archaeology in New England has been generally less
immediately rewarding than in many other areas of North America. The
poorer conditions of preservation, the apparent absence of deeply
stratified sites and the dense settlement pattern in this region
have contributed to this condition. With the emergence of what is
now being called historical archaeology, however, new potentials are
being realized in New England. The efforts of Plimoth Plantation
are showing dramatically that Colonial history can be meaningfully
rewritten through the lenses of anthropology and that archaeology
does not by any means end where history begins. Indeed, a new
understanding is being achieved for that period in early Colonial
history when an immigrant European culture was transformed into
something distinctively American.
For many anthropological studies that will undoubtedly be made about
southern New England, the culture of the 17th century Indians will
be an important baseline. This monograph will be one of the valuable
sources for scholars undertaking such studies.