The Archaeology of New Netherland: Why It Matters

Abstract

New York History Summer / Fall 2015© 2015 by The New York State Historical Association 374 The Archaeology of New Netherland: Why It Matters Paul R. Huey The ongoing transcription, translation, and publication of the colonial Dutch records of New Netherland is of critical importance to both historians and archaeologists. Archaeologists are specialized historians who use, in addition to documents, the buried physical evidence of the New Netherland Dutch. Archaeological sites are a vast primary source of information that is not available anywhere else. Archaeological artifacts and the contexts from which they are excavated provide a more complete understanding of New Netherland than scholars can possibly obtain in the limited extant documents. Excavations at Dutch sites beginning in the early 1970s have already produced new insights and new sources of information. However, archaeological sites, like documents, are not infinite in number. They are vulnerable to destruction through new development, and whenever destruction cannot be avoided, it must be a priority to conduct excavations and rescue all possible information. Archaeological excavation is itself the carefully controlled destruction of a site, and sites that have been protected and set aside on public land should be excavated only when a project is well-funded and when there are well-defined, specific research goals. These sites are non-renewable resources; unlike documents, they cannot be re-read and re-translated. The collections that they yield (consisting of artifacts, field records, and other documentation) are sources that should be carefully curated and made available to future generations of scholars for study and interpretation. This essay examines the current state of archaeological work on New Netherland and the many research possibilities still available to archaeologists and historians. Huey The Archaeology of New Netherland 375 The First Archaeological Discoveries Archaeological excavations at Dutch sites in the Hudson Valley in the early 1970s awakened a new public interest in and enthusiasm for the history of New Netherland. For the first time, actual physical evidence of daily life in the colony was uncovered at a number of seventeenth-century sites. The first major discovery occurred in Kingston, New York, at a site threatened by urban renewal. In an archaeological project facilitated by the New York State Historic Trust, in July 1970 Bert Salwen of New York University excavated and uncovered stockade posts from the original Wiltwyck stockade.1 In October 1970 the State Historic Trust also sponsored excavation of part of the site of Fort Orange in Albany, located in the path of Interstate 787. The project continued nonstop, under shelter, until completed in March 1971.2 Then, from 1971 until 1974, the Historic Trust conducted excavations at the Schuyler Flatts site north of Albany in Menands, a site threatened with the construction of a new Sirloin & Saddle Restaurant. Those excavations revealed evidence of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth-century Schuyler family occupation. They also found remains from the cellar of Arent van Curler’s large farmhouse (1643 to 1666).3 The rich variety of artifacts, especially from Fort Orange and the Schuyler Flatts, showed that life in New Netherland was no crude struggle for survival, but instead that the Dutch had managed to import the essentials of their “Golden Age” material culture largely intact. For the first time since A.J.F. van Laer translated and published Dutch documents in 1. Sarah T. Bridges, “The Clinton Avenue Site, Kingston, New York” (M.A. thesis, Department of Anthropology, New York University, 1974). 2. Paul R. Huey, “Aspects of Continuity and Change in Colonial Dutch Material Culture at Fort Orange, 1624–1664” (Ph.D. diss., Department of American Civilization, University of Pennsylvania, 1988); Paul R. Huey, “Dutch Colonial Forts in New Netherland,” in First Forts: Essays on the Archaeology of Proto-colonial Fortifications, ed. Eric Klingelhofer (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2010), 142–151. 3. James W. Bradley, Before Albany: An Archaeology of Native-Dutch Relations in the Capital Region, 1600–1664, New York State Museum Bulletin 509 (Albany: The State Education Department, 2007), 100–104; Paul R. Huey, “Archeological Evidence of Dutch Wooden Cellars and Perishable Wooden Structures at Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Sites in the Upper Hudson Valley,” in New World Dutch Studies: Dutch Arts and Culture in Colonial America...