The Shock of Colonialism in New England
The Shock of Colonialism in New England
Fragments from a Frontier
Explores the untold impacts of colonialism in New England through diverse colonist lives, Indigenous encounters, and environmental legacies
In The Shock of Colonialism in New England, archaeologist Meghan C. L. Howey uses excavations in the seventeenth-century colonial frontier of the Great Bay Estuary/P8bagok in today’s New Hampshire to trace the connection between European global colonialism and the planetary climate crises. Howey shows how this landscape holds forgotten stories of what it meant to live through the shock of colonialism.
These stories reveal an unexpected diversity and dynamism among English colonists, multifaceted encounters with Indigenous peoples, and lasting environmental damage from labor-intensive industries. Early Euro-American maps and stunning archaeological finds, such as a broken pickaxe embedded in a hearth and a historical marker for the Oyster River “Massacre” of 1694, complicate our limited views of a shared past.
The reality of English colonialism in the dispossession of Indigenous lands and its wake is not what is seen commemorated. Howey’s work is a powerful corrective that traces the rise of intergenerational colonial wealth made possible by land commodified as property, the increased labor required to work newly opened land, the importation of indentured Scots and enslaved Africans to provide that labor, and the resulting degradation of the natural environment. Through Howey’s insights into the stories they tell, these fragments from a frontier can help contemporary readers better understand the past as they seek a more just and sustainable future.
‘Meghan Howey has written a timely book that will change your thinking about early New England as well as its relationship to the present.’
—Emerson W. Baker, author of A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience
Howey's use of archaeological and cartographic evidence is superb—she is a well-established and respected archaeologist, and she has run a project in the estuary, the Great Bay Archaeological Survey (GBAS), for years. No one knows the long history of this place better than Howey.' —Robbie Ethridge, author of From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540–1715
The Shock of Colonialism in New England is an important case study for examining sociopolitical and human-environment relationships in the context of settler colonialism and the consequences Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities bear today.' —Siobhan M. Hart, author of Colonialism, Community, and Heritage in Native New England
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Fragments from Mapping
2. Fragments from Becoming
3. Fragments from Becoming (the English Perspective)
4. Fragments from “Disorderly Elements”
5. Fragments from Shifting Realities
6. Fragments from Violence
Conclusion: Washing Away
Notes
Bibliography
Index
