The Materiality of Fishing, Property, and Labor in Western Massachusetts

Abstract

This article explores the complexities of property and competing regimes of value in the colonial and Federal periods. The end of the 18th century saw a growing privatization of previously common resources as part of the emergence of a broadly, if unevenly, constituted capitalist mode of production in western Massachusetts. Excavations at the Frary House/Barnard Tavern in rural Deerfield, Massachusetts, provide a seemingly mundane index of this broad social change in the differential presence of fish scales in trash pits at the site. Anadromous fish have been a means of subsistence for indigenous communities who lived along the Connecticut River valley for thousands of years, but following English colonization and conquest, they became caught up in broader anxieties and struggles over the nature of work, property, and social and material value. This article documents some of these struggles in the region, as a reminder that consumption and subsistence are never isolated from broader social and structural processes.