“This great wild tract”: Henry David Thoreau, Native Americans, and the archaeology of Estabrook Woods

Abstract

In an 1857 journal entry, Henry David Thoreau described a visit to what he described as a Native American cornfield in Estabrook Woods, a remote portion of Concord, Massachusetts. He noted that the individual hills extended “in straight rows over the swells and valleys ... like the burial ground of some creatures.” Recent archaeological investigations in Estabrook Woods have explored both the cornfield and an adjacent 18th-century farmstead. This paper draws links between landscape change in Concord and larger scale agricultural changes that reshaped the rural communities around Boston. We situate Thoreau’s descriptions of Estabrook Woods in a context of wider 19th-century economic turbulence, as well as his lifelong fascination with Native American culture. The article concludes with reflections on the contemporary conflict between development interests and those who admire Thoreau, and the effect of that conflict on the research agenda.