Aboriginal Archaeology

Observers of New England know how to read the landscape. Along with other experienced observers, New England archaeologists, through their own fieldwork and experience, have also learnt to heed and make meaning of subtle marks such as the Bora rings. The archaeological meaning of such traces is written mostly as archaeological accounts. The archaeological story of New England, as it has been pieced together since the 1960s, reveals the distinctive character of Aboriginal hunter-gatherer peoples' past inhabitation of the landscape. In this chapter, the author has chosen three common elements of the regional archaeological tales - ceremonies, cold climates and group movement, and focused on their spatial aspects, rather than on their chronology or archaeological artefacts, to build up a picture of archaeologists' evolving construction of the regional cultural landscape. The chapter is in three parts: first a brief description of the New England landscape, its archaeological sites and kinds of societies that shaped them; then a sketch of the regional themes established by the work of archaeologists Isabel McBryde and Luke Godwin, and finally a description of the issues the author considers important for the future of New England archaeology.