For those who have had the good fortune to live in Providence, Rhode Island, Patricia Rubertone's fine new book, Native Providence: Memory, Community, and Survivance in the Northeast is revelatory—an entirely new way of looking at this old “thoroughfare” city. For others not so lucky, Rubertone's innovative work still stands out as a model of historical archaeological analysis and practice—an embodiment of the hopes of the discipline's founders that the skillful inter-reading of archaeological collections, geographical evidence, and what James Deetz called “docufacts” can contribute to analyses that transcend the study of any one of these bodies of data separately.

The topic of the book is the Native residents and neighborhoods hidden in plain sight in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Providence. This was an “urban” Indian landscape characterized by materialized links of mutual support, creative uses by its occupants of diverse resources, their strategic patterns of mobility, and their links to ancestral communities in what had come to be known as New England. Rubertone's consideration of these topics frees us from an overly rigid understanding of Native regional dynamics, and it is a tribute to Native survivance.

The Native population of Providence was drawn from several tribal groups in the region during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries as well as from descendants of Indigenous groups who had been irreparably dispersed early in the region's postcontact colonial history. As Rubertone demonstrates, these diverse Native peoples developed a citywide network and also maintained ties with the less precarious communities of Wampanoags, Nipmucs, Narragansetts, and Pequots who lived in more rural and more isolated areas of New England. Through participation in yearly ceremonials, through visits and letters, and by serving as hosts for a continuing stream of Native newcomers from elsewhere, the people of Native Providence retained a sense of “Indianness” in challenging circumstances.

Although it is entirely based on original research, Rubertone dedicates her book to the late William Simmons, her Brown University colleague, another anthropologist deeply immersed in the study and appreciation of southern New England's Indigenous past. Simmons was a master of the study of Native folklore, of memory, and of bringing the unnoticed into view. Rubertone's work is a fitting tribute to him. Furthermore, she has sought out and celebrated the thoughts and experiences of many Native collaborators, some of whom she has worked with for years, others young Native scholars entering the field of Indigenous studies in their own right.

Divided into seven chapters—including an introduction and epilogue—the book includes copious references, useful appendices, original maps, and reproductions of older but less-well-known documents relevant to her topic. She has chosen to examine the urban Indian landscape and history of Providence through the medium of small excavations of a number of Native homesites, business properties, and gathering places she previously identified through maps and other historical records as well as through oral history. Many of these buildings, neighborhoods, and other spaces no longer exist. But through imaginative reconstruction using archaeology, census data, city directories, and other sources, Rubertone has brought these homes, businesses, and gathering places back to life.

More interesting still, Rubertone has delved into the biographies of many of the subjects of her archaeological analysis, uncovering—among other things—some amazing evidence of remarkable entrepreneurial successes by several Native residents of Providence, who overcame the very restrictive circumstances in which they were forced to live. For example, Rubertone devotes part of a chapter to Nantucket Wampanoag Sarah Baxter, who developed a “patent medicine” business that drew on her cultural knowledge of herbal remedies. She also chronicles the life of Alexander Ammons, a Narragansett native who lived in Providence in the mid-nineteenth century and used his skills as a stonemason to help construct the Narragansett Indian Church on their reservation in 1859.

The theoretical import of this volume is also of note. Rubertone has already made significant contributions to theories of place and memorialization, and she has written often about collaborative anthropology in general terms. Native Providence takes these interests to a new level. Here, we are asked to reimagine “place” at many levels: as a mental construct, as a networked “space” invisible except to those who operated within it, and as a memorial to a fragmented but persistent Native history. Furthermore, Rubertone's treatment of the relationships among the Native Americans, European Americans, and African Americans who came to live in Providence makes visible and personal the complexities of 400 years of Native survival in a region wrested from them in the early colonial period. She also touches briefly but significantly on the racial and gendered discrimination experienced by all Native people of the Northeast, as reflected in oral histories and other evidence.

I thought I knew my New England, where I was born and brought up, and where I learned to revere the Native people among whom I lived. Rubertone's book reminds me that I still have a lot more to learn.