Abstract
As an academic pursuit, global historical archaeology has come of age in recent decades and provides an important perspective on international cultural encounters. Much of the research that appears in the Contributions to Global Historical Archaeology series, as well as the International Journal of Historical Archaeology, and Archaeologies: The Journal of the World Archaeological Congress, highlights the movement of ideas and material culture across the continents. Inspired by Braudel’s (1975) foundational perspective on worldwide economic systems, such research indicates the historical depth of international connections, today brought closer by technologies and international capital that foreshorten cultural differences and transformations (Freedman 2005). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, materials manufactured in Europe came to the New World with European explorers, adventurers, fishermen, missionaries, traders, and settlers, and were exchanged for tobacco, pelts, and furs produced by Native Americans. Ideas also traveled between the two worlds, initially during exploration and trade and later during colonization, often a consequence of coercion more than accommodation, but also selectively incorporated and resisted by colonized peoples. It is within this international perspective that I read historical texts and artifacts for clues to bodily privacy and intimacy in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England and for evidence of cultural transformation as a consequence of colonization and colonialism.
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Notes
- 1.
In this chapter, I distinguish only between “women” and “men” because the historical records provide no information about other gender categories.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Suzanne Spencer-Wood for her careful reading of this chapter; her recommendation that I refer to Collins, Hymowitz and Weissman, Coontz, and Morgan; and her thoughtful suggestions for chapter revisions. I also would like to acknowledge the support of Edward L. Bell, who has provided continued interest in the women of Ponkapoag and my research into their past. Dr. Maritza Straughn-Williams has frequently discussed colonialism and its consequences with me: I am deeply grateful for her critical engagement with this subject and my research.
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Clements, J.M. (2013). Intimate Matters in Public Encounters: Massachusetts Praying Indian Communities and Colonialism in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. In: Spencer-Wood, S. (eds) Historical and Archaeological Perspectives on Gender Transformations. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4863-1_6
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