Intimate Matters in Public Encounters: Massachusetts Praying Indian Communities and Colonialism in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

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.