UMass Boston Research Teams Combine Archaeology, History
Nearly $600,000 in prestigious grants awarded by the National Science Foundation are making it possible for UMass Boston archaeologists to uncover the ways in which society evolved during the Viking Age in Iceland, learn how the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation survived centuries of colonialism on a Connecticut reservation, and gain a better understanding of the interaction between African-Americans, Native Americans and Europeans on a Long Island plantation.
All three projects are part of a new field of study, being pioneered by UMass Boston’s Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research, which combines archaeology and history.
“This is something the university should be very proud of. It represents the development of this research cluster at UMass Boston that’s really putting itself on the map,” said David B. Landon, PhD, the center’s associate director and senior scientist in environmental archaeology.
“We’re all working on, in archaeology terms, what are very recent sites and on the line of archaeology and history,” said Landon, also an adjunct professor of anthropology. “We’re actually crossing that divide and giving a humanistic perspective to science research.”
UMass Boston is one of only two institutions without PhD programs in archaeology or anthropology to receive senior grants from the National Science Foundation. The largest is a $240,000, three-year grant awarded this month (June) for archaeological fieldwork in Skagafjördur, Iceland, which will begin on June 23. Dr. John Steinberg, the principal investigator and a Fiske Center scientist, and UMass Boston students will use ground-penetrating radar to help find and unearth Viking houses and farmsteads that date to 900 A.D.
“We want to understand how societies become more complex. We’re experiencing this all in our everyday lives as globalization ties one part of the world to another,” said Steinberg, also an adjunct professor of anthropology. “Iceland is the perfect laboratory.”
They will work with researchers from Northwestern University, the University of Iceland, the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of California, San Diego to try and piece together what led inhabitants to break off from the large farmsteads.
“Our real goal is determine how you move from chiefdoms, like what is found in Beowulf, to states,” Steinberg said. “On one hand these houses could be successfully freed slaves, on the other hand they could be sharecroppers.”
Discovering how colonization changed life for the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation on the 200-acre Lantern Hill reservation in Connecticut is the purpose of assistant professor Stephen Silliman’s work, which received a $114,000, three-year grant last summer.
“We are investigating specific issues of household and community identities, and what that looks like materially. What does it mean when native households are adopting essentially European items?” Silliman said. “We want to know how are they who they are, with the stuff they have.”
Silliman will return to the reservation for five weeks beginning July 1 with a team of 15, including three UMass Boston graduate students, to look for and uncover households from the 17th century. The grant funds the student assistantships, materials, housing and interns from the Pequot tribe.
“There are some assumptions that people have that when Native Americans started using metal nails and glass bottles that they somehow assimilated,” said Silliman, “What this is actually revealing is these are ways that people survived living on a reservation, living in a colonial world, which could be in various times a very bad economic environment.”
Native Americans are also the subject of Stephen Mrozowski’s research. In April, the Fiske Center Director and Anthropology Department Chairman was awarded a second $45,000 one-year grant—he received a $193,713 three-year grant in 2003—to aid in his study of Sylvester Manor, a New York plantation with Pequot ties that dates to 1652. Both grants paid for 40 undergraduates from across the nation, including those from UMass Boston, to conduct field research on the site and analyze the data back on campus over a four-year period.
“You’ve got these great students coming from all over the country to take part in the work. We not only get the educational piece, but we get the real payoff in terms of research,” said Mrozowski, who said that many of the students will be co-authors of a monograph on the project to come out at the end of the summer.
The study of Sylvester Manor has focused on "archaeobiology," which is the study of biological remains, including bones and shells, recovered through excavation and field sampling. Those remains help tell the tale of relationships between the Europeans, African-American slaves, and Native Americans workers at the manor, which provided supplies to sugar plantations in Barbados that are still in existence.
“It was cheaper for the plantations to rely on importing their foodstuffs than it was to waste the land there to grow crops,” Mrozowski said.
The Fiske Center, created in 1999 with an endowment from the late Mrs. Andrew Fiske as a memorial to her late husband Andrew, supports research in landscape, environmental and historical archaeology as well as environmental history. Other projects include investigating a former Nipmuc settlement in what is now called Hassanamessitt Woods in the town of Grafton.
In addition to research and excavation, the center works to promote the cultural heritage of Massachusetts by serving alongside other organizations as the curator and conservator for significant archaeological collections.