[Readers: In honor of Indigenous People’s/Columbus Day, I have adapted the following selection from my doctoral dissertation (The Enduring Commons: Ecology, Politics, and Economic Life in Plymouth County, Massachusetts: 1691-1815; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2016), describing an encounter between Wampanoag and English peoples in the period of contact and encounter.]
After the last Ice Age, archaeological evidence indicates local Native people, like their neighbors throughout northeastern North America, underwent a series of technological and cultural changes, moving, in the broadest sense and over the course of millennia, from relatively small hunter-gatherer bands to complex agricultural societies. These changes were significant enough that we are effectively talking about different societies, the way ancient Rome, the Court of Charlemagne, Renaissance Italy, and the contemporary European Union are each singular instances of an epoch in Western History.
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By the time of European contact, Wampanoag people, like their neighbors and close ethnic and linguistic relations, the Massachusett, around Boston Harbor, or the Narragansett, on the western shore of Narragansett Bay, lived in highly organized societies, with thousands of inhabitants in relatively cohesive political groupings (European observers identified Native leaders as “Kings,” but the sachems and other leaders of Algonquian-speaking peoples were not analogous to European monarchs; they had far less de jure power, and relied on a significant degree to persuasion and consensus, as many pre-modern societies did).
The first Europeans to reach that part of the New England coast that became Plymouth County were likely anonymous Basque, Breton, or Irish fishermen, or other voyagers from the peasant seafaring cultures of Europe's Atlantic littoral. Indeed, Samuel Gosnold, the first European sailor to record his journey to the coast of southeast New England, reported that the coastal Native people he encountered near Cape Neddick, in what is now Maine, in the spring of 1602, sailed in a vessel of Basque design: "... we came to an anker, where sixe Indians, in a Baske-shallop with mast and saile, an iron grapple, and a kettle of copper, came boldy aboord us, one of them apparelled with a waistcoat and breeches of blacke serdge, made after our sea-fashion, hose and shoes on his feet; all the rest (saving one that had a paire of breeches of blue cloth) were all naked."1 As Gosnold's account makes clear, the people he encountered (possibly from the Wabenaki or Penacook nations), with their use of an iron anchor and copper kettle, European clothes, and the boat itself, readily made use of aspects of material life and culture that came from across the Atlantic. The apparent familiarity of these Native people with European maritime technology and material culture suggests that at least several decades -- and probably many more -- of borderlands exchange had marked life on the New England coast. Verrazzano had, after all, reached Narragansett Bay as early as 1524.2