Nantucket and Other Native Places: The Legacy of Elizabeth Alden Little

2 Native American Architecture on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts

2 Native American Architecture on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts Mary Lynne Rainey In southern New England, the search for archaeological remains of Native American residences, community structures, or specialized building forms has been driven by a broad set of regional ethnohistoric descriptions, archaeological site data, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century imagery believed to encompass the physical reality of Algonquian vernacular architecture. Vernacular architecture can be defined in this case as an expression of Native control of the layout and construction of residential and institutional buildings within the social, cultural, and environmental context of the people (Kapches 1993, 138). The collective emphasis among historic and contemporary writers on wigwams as a universal Native house form has greatly influenced how archaeologists working in Algonquian territory have approached the potential for their discovery. Despite the well-defined and analyzed longhouse footprints, residential complexes, fortifications, and other features of Iroquoian structures and settlement patterns, the archaeological signature of traditional Indian households or buildings in general has remained illusive throughout southern New England. In a synthesis of regional (southern New England ) sites containing architectural information, Juli and Lavin (1996, 86) note, “It is clear that the archaeologically recovered structural data from the region are sparse. Several of the reported house forms are in excavation contexts that are either unclear, or poorly dated. Even the most careful excavations in this region are often hampered by poor preservation, overlapping elements from several periods and indistinct subsoil features.” New discoveries in recent years are beginning to reveal the regional diversity in the styles and functions of traditional Native American structures that existed and evolved for thousands of years. 25 26 Mary Lynne Rainey On Nantucket Island, most nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians have generalized the terms for Indian residences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as either “wigwams,” referring to traditional construction, or “English-style houses,” referring to those constructed using boards. In both primary and secondary documentary records, Native institutional structures fall under the interchangeable words “meetinghouse,” “church,” and “school.” Despite a substantial Indian population on Nantucket into the first half of the eighteenth century, standing wigwams in Squam in 1797, and a wood-framed Indian meetinghouse adapted as a Colonial residence until 1839, there are no known written descriptions of the appearance, construction materials, or design and engineering of residential, ceremonial, or institutional buildings built and used by the Nantucket Indians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This disregard for the details of daily Indian life can be attributed in part to the Christian Indian movement on Nantucket during the pre-Colonial and post-Colonial era, combined with widespread Colonial exploitation and the marginalization of Indians in the context of the whaling industry. To address the topic of historic Native American architecture, Dr. Elizabeth Little scoured deeds and probate records, resulting in an inventory of sixty seventeenth-to-eighteenth-century Indian houses, which were recognized by the English as property of value, and presumably constructed using boards and hardware in the English-built style (Little 1981). It was her contention that traditional wigwams, on the other hand, had no market value for the English and, therefore, were not inventoried or referred to as houses in the records (Little 1981, 6). While drawing a strong case for Indian-built wooden houses to exist today in Siasconset Village, originally a seventeenth-century group of small fishing shelters on the eastern elbow of the island, Little’s comprehensive manuscript underscores the lack of written records that describe indigenous building forms on Nantucket. With limited documentary records containing detail on the subject, a clear understanding of traditional Precontact, Contact, and Colonial period vernacular architecture on Nantucket must draw from the archaeological record. In order to identify these sites, archaeologists working under contract to assist project proponents in meeting their regulatory requirements on Nantucket consider several different lines of evidence. These include the regional and local ethnohistoric and historic records of Indian building forms, characteristics of residential archaeological sites from elsewhere in the region, Nantucket Indian deeds and probate inventories , island merchant account books, Christian Indian material culture studies, and the Native American cultural context and landscape history of 27 Native American Architecture on Nantucket Island the specific area under study. Since 1997, this multidisciplinary approach to the archaeology of Nantucket has contributed to the discovery of seven systematically excavated archaeological sites containing evidence of Native American traditional domestic and institutional architecture prior to and...