Field School Archaeology the Mohegan Way: Reflections on Twenty Years of Community-Based Research and Teaching

Sustaining an authentic community partnership through the Fort St. Joseph archaeological project

“…Despite their representation on the advisory committee since its inception, they are understandably reticent to participate fully in archaeology and rightly question the motives of archaeologists. Consequently, we collectively decided against efforts to locate and evaluate eighteenth-century Native American sites, although the hope is that archaeology will someday be seen as a tool that can assist Native peoples in recovering aspects of their histories that have been erased by dominant narratives (see Cipolla and Quinn 2016;Low 2018;Nassaney 2012;Nicholas 2008).…”

Earth flows and lively stone. What differences does ‘vibrant’ matter make?

“…The many dry-laid stone features scattered through the woodlands of New England include walls (figure 1), small structures often interpreted as the remains of colonial root cellars, and piles of varying shapes and sizes. For the purposes of this essay, I focus specifically on discourse and debate concerning the piles (Cipolla 2013a, 85–86; 2016; Cipolla and Quinn 2016, 123–24; McLoughlin 2017), but some thinkers have extended the arguments reviewed below to include certain walls and structures. Labelled ‘memory piles’, ‘field clearing’, ‘taverns’ or ‘sacrifice rocks’ (Crosby 1988; Butler 1946; Ives 2013; 2015a; 2015b; Simmons 1986, 254–55; Speck 1945; Weslager 1947) depending on when and, of course, whom one asks, the piles in question embody the binary and absolutist nature of many colonial heritage struggles and debates.…”

“…In a recent co-authored article (Cipolla and Quinn 2016, 123), my colleague James Quinn, the Mohegan tribal historical preservation officer, noted that the Mohegan Tribal Historic Preservation Office ‘believes that the prayers and ceremony imbued in these features on the landscape are still active and remain so until destroyed, making them vital sites that connect Mohegan people to their ancestors and to the land’.…”

“…Within these debates, the features in question are ceremonial and otherworldly or practical and utilitarian, alive and ancestral or inanimate and fundamentally non-human, prehistoric or historic, and – most important for the purposes of this essay – part of Indigenous or white heritage. Such features are rarely considered in terms of the diverse and entangled nature of colonial history in New England (Cipolla 2016; Cipolla and Quinn 2016; Ives 2013; 2015a; 2015b).

Figure 1Stone wall in New London, Connecticut.

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“…In this essay, I engage both endorsements and critiques of post-humanism, parsing the literature in terms of the archaeology of colonialism and the archaeology of Indigenous history. I discuss these new directions in theory in regard to recent heritage struggles concerning New England's stone landscapes (Cipolla and Quinn 2016, 123–24; Ives 2013; 2015a; 2015b; McLoughlin 2017). When considered in terms of competing heritage narratives, only one of which can be true , these debates have the potential to become volatile.…”