Slavery before Race: Europeans, Africans, and Indians at Long Island's Sylvester Manor Plantation, 1651-1884

2. Convergence

2 / Convergence Contrary to popular historical depictions, Europeans did not arrive to a find terra nullius in the New World; likewise, history did not begin with their arrival. To understand the relationships and interactions of European colonists and Native Americans in southern New England and coastal New York, we must first look to Native histories prior to European colonization. The social structures in place here played a significant role in the ability of English and Dutch to establish and expand colonial settlements. Southern New England and Long Island were ecologically rich and diverse environments that, by the Late Woodland period (one thousand to five hundred years before present [BP]) were supporting increasing populations in a variety of subsistence and settlement types. Scholars of historical linguistics suggest that the residents of this area descend from a common group of Proto-Algonquian speakers, dating to the beginning of the Woodland period (ca. 2,700 years BP) (Snow 1980; Ritchie 1980). As there is no contemporaneous archaeological evidence of population replacement, this group was probably created by introducing migrants to the existing peoples, for example through adoption, marriage, and community expansion by incorporating Algonquian newcomers from the west (Bragdon 1996, 32–34). The people of the Northeast were later separated from the wider pool of Algonquian speakers by the influx of Iroquoian groups moving north and west into New York and Pennsylvania; thus the residents of the Northeast are distinguished as Eastern Algonquians (Bragdon 1996; Goddard 1978). Eastern Algonquians throughout the Northeast shared many cultural affinities, likely maintained 18 / convergence by a partially mobile population, and some scholars have argued that they also developed social connections with Iroquoian groups who were not of the same linguistic ancestry (Chilton 1998, 137–138), a point that becomes important in understanding the colonial period tribal polities. Within this larger Eastern Algonquian sphere, tribes living in eastern Long Island, including the Manhanset of Shelter Island and the Montaukett , Shinnecock, and Corchaug had closest cultural ties to Southern New England, instead of to their neighbors to the west and south in New York (Solecki 1950, 8–10). The Eastern Long Island groups were recognized in the colonial period as the Paumanoc confederacy (Ales 1979; Tooker 1911, 182–184; see map on page 27). Much of what we know of these historical trajectories is derived from the integration of archaeological, ethnohistorical, and oral historical sources. These can be summarized through three major themes of cultural change and practices immediately prior to the settlement of European colonists, which greatly influenced the nature of colonial encounters : subsistence, settlement types, and political structures (regional spheres of interaction and exchange). Subsistence: New England’s precolonial history has typically been periodized based on distinctive changes in subsistence strategies. The models that archaeologists have often used are, however, based on quite different, noncoastal areas, like the Paleoindian period seen in western North America or the Archaic and early Woodland periods in Iroquois upstate New York. The Paleoindian period (12,500–10,000 years BP) is characterized by specialized megafauna hunting; the Archaic period (10,000–2,700 years BP) is characterized by diversified, broad-spectrum hunting, gathering, and fishing; and the Woodland period (2,700–500 years BP) is characterized by specialization again, with the introduction and intensification of agriculture, primarily of maize, beans, and squash (Snow 1980; Ritchie 1980). But archaeological evidence, especially botanical remains, interpreted in the past several decades suggests that this model does not fit for the coastal New England/New York area (Bernstein 2006). Very few Paleoindian sites have been recovered in the Northeast, and none in the coastal zones, due to the rising sea- levels. In fact, the earliest coastal sites are dated to sometime between 3,000 and 2,000 years BP (Lightfoot et al. 1987, 27–28). Further inland, environmental studies also increasingly support the notion that a reasonably diverse range of plant species would have been available in addition to the megafauna in the earliest periods of New England human history (Bernstein 2006). convergence / 19 Evidence from coastal sites also often directly contradicts the models that emphasize agricultural development during the Woodland period or more often indicates a difference in the degree to which such intensification occurred. Refinement and synthesis of radiocarbon dates across southern New England and Long Island have shown that prior to 1,400 years BP, adoption of maize agriculture by Eastern Algonquians was rare and isolated, a timing that does...