Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Native Peoples and Archaeology in the Northeastern United States

11. The Past Is Present: CRM Archaeology on Martha's Vineyard

11. The Past Is Present 8GB Archaeology on Martha’s Vineyard =DAAN =:G7HI:G 6C9 HJO6CC: 8=:G6J Introduction or many New England archaeologists, the island of Martha’s Vineyard has a historical connection to the excavation and interpretation of Native American sites. Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, some of the region’s most prominent scholars came to investigate complex habitation and ceremonial sites on the pristine shores of the island ’s coastal ponds. The work of Samuel Guernsey (1916), Douglas Byers and Frederick Johnson (1940), and especially William Ritchie (1969) served as the framework by which southern New England prehistory was (and in many cases still is) interpreted. Martha’s Vineyard is also home to the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head/ Aquinnah (wtgh/a), a federally recognized Native American tribe whose ancestors were the first to populate the island. Wampanoag ancestors have lived on Noepe, the island’s Algonquian name, for the last 10,000 years, and this group is one of a few in southern New England that has been recorded as continuous residents of the land from the first European contact to the present day. The physical isolation of Martha’s Vineyard and the unique patterns of settlement on the island have contributed to the F  preservation of the town of Aquinnah (formerly known as Gay Head) as a primarily Native American community that has been well documented through oral traditions and non-Native historical studies. Today, at the turn of a new century, the archaeological connection to the Vineyard’s Native people continues to evolve. Since 1990 more than 50 cultural resource management (crm) projects have been completed on the island. Archaeological survey and excavation have been triggered by rapid islandwide development and subsequent state and local permiting requirements . In addition, local groups (Native and non-Native) have looked to archaeological site identification as a mechanism to slow the construction of golf courses and houses threatening the Vineyard’s distinctive environmental and cultural setting. In addition, the emergence of the Aquinnah Wampanoag as a recognized regulatory voice in the community has brought issues of heritage to the larger island population. The growing power of Native peoples to control access to, and interpretation of, cultural sites is helping to shape archaeological research toFigure 11.1. Location of Martha’s Vineyard and the town of Aquinnah in southeastern Massachusetts (Prepared by Jennifer Macpherson). Herbster and Cherau  day, and Martha’s Vineyard is proving to be one of the most successful examples of Native American oversight and involvement in the region. This chapter discusses the significant changes that the tribe has brought about in both the practice of archaeology and the interpretations of excavated sites on the Vineyard. Environmental and Cultural Context Located seven miles off the southwestern tip of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard covers 310 km2 and is the largest island in the region (Figure 11.1). It supports a year-round population of about 15,000 people and more than 100,000 during the summer. Academic archaeologists were drawn to the island, in part, because of its remote and relatively undisturbed setting. In particular, the up-island towns of Chilmark and Aquinnah were slow to develop as modern residential communities (electricity and telephone service arrived in Aquinnah only in the 1950s), and large areas of scrub forest, open pasture, and sand dunes characterize the area today. The Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe was federally acknowledged in 1987 and is currently the only federally recognized Native American tribe in Massachusetts. In trust with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the tribe owns 196 ha on the Vineyard, much of it clustered around the nineteenthcentury Wampanoag settlement area in Aquinnah. The wtgh/a is the most visible Native presence on Martha’s Vineyard, although several other Wampanoag groups, such as the Chappaquiddick Tribe, hold annual gatherings on the island. crm on the Vineyard The temporal range of Native occupation on the Vineyard was only partially identified by earlier professional and avocational archaeologists, who focused on large coastal shell midden sites that often contained ceremonial or burial sites. Few of these excavations included consultation with the Aquinnah community. Even as late as the 1960s, Ritchie’s (1969) interpretations of Woodland period (ca. 3,000–500 b.p. [years before present]) habitation sites on the island were nearly devoid of any connection to the present-day Wampanoag living within view of his excavations. The Past...