FOREWORD
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.
THE WAMPANOAGS IN THE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
An Ethnohistorical Study
by Catherine Marten
And also those which should escape or overcome these difficulties, should yett be in continuall danger of the salvage people; who are cruell, barbarous, and most trecherous, being most furious in their rage, and merciles wher they overcome; not being contente only to kill, and take away life, but delight to tormente men in the most bloodie manner that may be; fleaing some alive with the shells of fishes, cutting of the members and joynts of others by peesmeale; and broiling on the coles, eate the collops of their flesh in their sight whilst they live, with other cruelties horrible to be related.
One of many fearsome prospects awaiting Europeans who would settle upon the American continent was thus described by William Bradford—Indians. In faraway Europe this simplistic view of the cruel and hostile primitives that inhabited the New World seemed adequate. But Bradford and his friends—known to history as the Pilgrims, who settled at Plymouth Massachusetts in 1620—were destined to see one group of North American Indians in a different way. Who were the Indians that greeted the Pilgrims and what can be told of their culture?
The Indians that inhabited New England are often collectively designated as Algonquians. This name actually signifies a group of tribes whose languages are related and are therefore classified together as members of the Algonquian language family. Speakers of Algonquian languages are not restricted to New England, however; rather they are spread widely over the North American continent. To the west on the Great Plains such tribes as the Blackfoot and the Arapaho, to the north the Naskapi, Abnaki, and Micmac, and to the south along the Atlantic Coast the Powhattan and the Chickahominy are a few examples of members of this large linguistic family. Besides noting that the languages spoken by these groups are related to one another, we can also speak of some broad similarities in culture shared by speakers of Algonquian languages. However, by the time of European contact both languages and cultures had diversified enough that Algonquian speakers from widely separated areas would not have understood one another’s speech and customs.
The tribe of Algonquians with which this monograph is chiefly concerned is the Wampanoags, which inhabited the immediate area around New Plimoth and from whose ranks came such familiar figures as Squanto, Massasoit, Hobomock, and Metacomet (King Philip). This tribe was also sometimes called the Pokanokets, after Pokanoket, Rhode Island, where the Sachems kept their principal headquarters.[1] Because they were closely related linguistically and culturally, however, one can with justification include information pertaining to the immediate neighbors of the Wampanoags—the Nausets, the Massachusetts, and the Narragansetts.[2] The lumping of these groups for the purpose of more completely filling out a cultural description of the Wampanoags is further legitimatized by the fact that since the devastation caused by a plague in 1616 or 1617 the members of these tribes had intermixed to some extent anyhow. The Indian village of Patuxet had formerly been located on the site where the Pilgrims were to establish New Plimoth; it had been wiped out by a plague. The sole survivor from Patuxet was Squanto, who had joined the band of a sachem called Massasoit.
Political relationships among the Indian groups of southeastern New England were variable depending upon the leadership abilities and popularity of their several sachems at various times. Massasoit and his immediate successors seem to have been quite powerful rulers and to have held the several sub-tribes of Wampanoags into a cohesive body.[3] At various times the Wampanoags ruled the Nauset of Cape Cod. They were frequently allied with the Massachusetts and were frequently at war with the Narragansetts. At the time when the Pilgrims arrived both the Wampanoags and the Massachusetts were considerably weakened in numbers by the plague of a few years earlier, which had left the Narragansetts relatively unscathed. The Wampanoags seem to have recognized in the new arrivals a potential ally, hence the Pilgrims were welcomed, albeit cautiously.[4]
The pages that follow attempt to describe as fully as possible the culture of the Wampanoags as it would have been during the lifetime of Plymouth Colony—1620 to about 1690. A few words are in order in regard to sources of information. The normal procedure for gaining ethnographic information is for a trained observer—usually an anthropologist—to live among the people he wants to study, interviewing informants and observing with the aid of notebook, tape recorder, and camera the activities and habits of the groups under study. This sort of a systematic investigation, however, is an invention of modern anthropology and is a phenomenon dating only to the last hundred years or so. Long before that time, contact with the technology, ideology, and diseases of Europeans had so altered the culture and diminished the numbers of most of the Eastern seaboard tribes, including the Wampanoags, that such a study would have been impossible. To describe the culture of the Wampanoags, therefore, it is necessary to turn to the historical record—both written and archaeological—for the only surviving information on these people.
The best sources for information on Wampanoag culture are the journals and letters of travelers and settlers of the 16th and 17th centuries. Among the Pilgrims, Edward Winslow proved to be an exceptional ethnographer, having recorded a number of insightful observations on Indian culture. John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay sent a collection of Indian artifacts back to England, some of which are still preserved in the British Museum. Of lesser value to the present purpose are writings of the latter half of the 17th century by missionaries who were trying to teach Christianity to the Indians. Their interests were in the progress of the civilized customs of a godly existence, and their writings do not focus upon aboriginal behavior. Information about artifacts and structures, often incompletely described by earlier chroniclers, can be added to by a study of the archaeological remains of Indian activity.
There will be omissions from the cultural description—questions never to be answered. But it is hoped that the bringing together in ethnographic format of what information is extant will give some insight into and further the understanding of Wampanoag culture as it was at approximately the time the Pilgrims encountered it.