Based on papers presented at a public conference in 2016, the 10 chapters of this book discuss Henry Hudson's 1609 visit to a Mohican Village in Castleton, New York; the founding of New Netherland and its history; cultural accommodations between Dutch colonists and Indigenous peoples; comparisons of two Indigenous forts; Dutch–Indigenous relationships in the Mohawk Valley; Dutch–Wiechquaeskeck relations; Dutch–Pequot archaeology; an early Dutch fort on the Connecticut coast; the Dutch fur trade on the Connecticut River; and a summary of the Dutch presence in eastern New Netherland (i.e., Connecticut). In the first chapter, Shirley Dunn considers where exactly Henry Hudson went ashore when he visited a Mohican village, and she posits that this village was located on Castle Hill, which later became Castle Town and then Castleton. In the last chapter, Lucianne Lavin summarizes knowledge about Dutch colonialism and impacts on Indigenous peoples in areas from Cape Cod to Delaware Bay.
In Chapter 2, Charles T. Gehring summarizes political developments in sixteenth-century Europe that led to the founding of New Netherland. He discusses the opening and development of the New World fur trade and its relationship to the control of wampum production as a form of currency to facilitate exchange.
In Chapter 3, Stephen T. Staggs examines Dutch accounts to reconstruct practices by Dutch and Indigenous groups of sharing maize and other foods, as well as material culture such as duffels, coats, awls, knives, hatchets, smoking pipes, and kettles. The Dutch looked to Indigenous allies for military alliances and diplomatic assistance. Staggs describes this mutual dependence as “familiarity” and friendship.
In Chapter 4, Ann-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall contrast Dutch–Indigenous relations on Long Island and in the Mohawk Valley. Fort Massapeag was a fortified Munsee-Algonquin trading post next to a wampum-manufacturing site on western Long Island. The Freeman site, a palisaded Mohawk village, was constructed with the aid of the Dutch to move an entire village closer to Fort Orange (present-day Albany). Structural components of the Mohawk fortification are discussed with an eye to determining when and who learned to construct bastions at the corners of palisaded forts. In either case, the focus of Dutch–Indigenous relations was political alliance building, whether to trade Dutch artifacts for wampum at Fort Massapeag or to trade wampum for furs and thereby develop meaningful long-term relationships in the Mohawk Valley.
In Chapter 5, Paul Gorgen presents an Indigenous view of Mohawk-Dutch relations in the Mohawk Valley during the seventeenth century and beyond. Gorgen traces the history, symbolic import, and meaning of the Two Row Wampum Treaty from its origin at Tawasentha (an Indigenous fishing site near Fort Nassau) to the present. Gorgen discusses Dutch-Mohawk interdependence and intermarriage in Schenectady during the late 1600s and early 1700s, three Mohawk leaders who traveled to London in 1710 to meet Queen Anne, and two 1695 maps showing Dutch structures and Mohawk longhouses together within palisaded settlements.
In Chapter 6, Marshall Joseph Becker synthesizes information regarding the Wiechquaeskeck, who appear on early maps of southeastern New York and New England. However, due to local conflicts, as well as their relationships with the Dutch and other Indigenous groups in what is now southeastern New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey, their presence in the ethnohistoric literature has been sporadic and confusing. Their original homeland included Westchester County, southwestern Connecticut, and Manhattan Island. Becker traces Wiechquaeskeck history through periods of pelt trade and colonial warfare and diplomacy, tracking the shifting identities of the Wiechquaeskeck as they periodically merged with other Algonquian speakers.
In Chapter 7, Kevin A. McBride sheds light on interactions among Pequot, Dutch, and English between 1611 and 1637. The material culture presentation here is particularly strong, with five well-dated domestic Pequot sites providing significant amounts of Dutch and English trade items. The description of these five sites, and their context within Dutch and English trading spheres, is relatively new to the literature, and the chapter identifies the largest concentration of “early seventeenth-century sites associated with a single Native group yet identified in southern New England” (p. 211).
In Chapter 8, John Pfeiffer discusses his excavation of the early seventeenth-century Dutch settlement of Roduins along the Connecticut shoreline in Branford. Pfeiffer contrasts traditional views of the Dutch in Connecticut, derived from writings by English settlers from English viewpoints, with maps and historical accounts of early Dutch commerce. The fort at Roduins gave the Dutch a location for trade and storage of wampum and furs in proximity to an Indigenous village.
In Chapter 9, Richard Manack describes the history of the state of Connecticut's first well-documented European settlement, The House of Good Hope (Huys de Goede Hoop), founded in 1633 by the Dutch West India Company. Located in present-day Hartford, this fortified trading post and surrounding bouwerie was occupied by Dutch settlers and traders until approximately 1653. Manack outlines an early (ca. 1623) triangular trade in eastern New Netherland, in which furs, wampum, and European manufactured goods circulated.
An underlying theme of this volume is the Dutch West India Company's (WIC) focus on maintaining the fur trade rather than developing long-term control of key geographic areas, which would have necessitated increasing the number of Dutch settlers in New Netherland. Another focus is that New Netherland during the early seventeenth century extended from Cape Cod to Delaware Bay, an often overlooked fact due to a paucity of archaeological data on small fur-trading sites combined with the English narrative that the Dutch were never in New England to begin with. Several chapters in this book provide new archaeological data that enrich our understanding of these small trading forts and the Indigenous groups that supplied them with furs. Dutch–Indigenous politics, warfare, and trade encompassed most of the Indigenous groups residing in New York, northern New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. They are the Delaware, Eastern Niantic, Esopus, Hackensack, Haudenosaunee (Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga), Horikan, Kichtawank, Lenape, Lenopi, Mohican, Minnisinck, Mohegan, Munsee, Narragansett, Navasink, Niantic, Pequot, Pompton, Quiripey (Quinnipiac), Raretangh (Raritan), Rechgawawanck, Sequin, Shinnecock, Sinsink, Susquehannock, Tappan, Wangunk, Wapenocks (Wampanoag), Waping (Wappinger), Western Niantic, and Wiechquaeskeck.
