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Prologue These days, as in the past, anyone who wishes to visit Shelter Island must travel by water, for there are no bridges spanning the passage. Sturdy ferries , carrying fifteen or so cars on a trip, make the crossing at the north and south ends of the island. Boat travel to me feels like a sidestep into another time, the gentle rolling motion unlike most modern forms of transportation, despite the fact that you can make the ferry trip while sitting in a car. The ferry ride serves as a temporal rupture, a sign perhaps that history here will not perform as expected. Arriving at the island, visitors find a quaint but bustling village, especially in the summer, as it is a popular destination for its resorts and summer rentals. But when I turn into the imposing gates to the unpaved roadway of the Sylvester Manor estate, I am immediately enveloped in the quietude of the woods. All sounds of traffic are swallowed on the winding way through thick trees and undergrowth covering a rolling topography created by glacial retreat. It is easy to think that the estate land has not been touched by the modern world, much less a plantation with links spanning the Atlantic world of the seventeenth century. I recall thinking so the first time I came to this place, as part of a team of archaeologists beginning in 1997. After many years of working here, I can no longer see it as a “pristine” landscape; instead, it is gravid with historical associations, some learned through stories and archives, others by visceral experience. I see a rough boulder by the roadway with fading letters engraved on it, marking the burial of servants and enslaved persons. There the road forks, one side leading to a second burial ground and memorial to Quakers, while the other leads to fields where, old xviii / prologue farm-hands have told us, countless stone arrow points and pieces of locally made pottery have been churned up by plows. Off deep in the undergrowth, I remember seeing a single piece of clay tobacco pipe emerge with a shovelful of dirt. Eventually a pair of barns appears as the trees thin, right before the turn that reveals the Manor house built by Brinley Sylvester in the 1730s. It is surrounded not by trees, but by expanses of smooth green lawn, dropping gently to the north and west down to Gardiner’s Creek, usually home to geese or swans or Great Blue herons. On the east side of the Manor, however, is the two-acre formal garden, still edged by fence and boxwood hedge, now grown a bit wild. Such a garden elicits the later nineteenth century, a romantic Victorian time of wealthy leisure, tea and croquet, ladies in filmy dresses with servants discreetly positioned in the background. The symmetrical, imposing face of the mansion, groomed lawn, and remnants of ornamental gardens betray neither the plantation infrastructure that preceded it nor the indigenous community who long occupied the island. But just there, in the lawn, I see a depression in the ground marking the place where we uncovered a tremendous pit filled with slaughter waste, brick and mortar, fragments of kitchenwares made in the seventeenth century. In the midst of this trash, like a jewel in the rough (“ya gotta see this,” the project director Steve told me, pulling on my elbow), colleagues uncovered the whole rim of a pot, beautifully decorated in a style commonly found at sites of colonial-era Native American occupation. That’s impossible, I thought . . . but why? To my eye, the Manor landscape now holds an incredible history, one that in its prosaic, day-to-day activities never made it into documentary records. But I’ve come to realize that the mundane nature of the perspective is not the only reason this history has eluded our common narratives. The history has been written in a very different way in local memory, and the landscape has been reshaped to support this well-known story, in which Europeans, Native Americans, and enslaved Africans occupy distinct spaces and temporalities. The preservation and representation of certain histories—that which is consciously remembered —stands in stark contrast to the aspects of the past that have been abandoned, torn down, thrown away, and literally buried—a place where the three groups interacted routinely. Having dug beneath the surface of the contemporary landscape and into the stories that are still told of the place, I can no longer...

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