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.