Contact

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What happened in the wake of the arrival of 'Europeans' in the Americas? Many ways to approach that, including epidemiological and genetic and technological and demographic and biotic and... cultural (each of those has vast complexities to explore and interlink).

I started to create a shelflist of my holdings that bear upon that Contact, looking at what text resources I can use to inform my understanding of results and process

?is there an archaeology of contact?

I re-read and also listened to Charles C Mann's 1491 to remind myself of the pre-Columbian state of the Americas

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About as succinct a summary as I've found:

Indian peoples reaped the riches of the northeastern woodlands in seasonally mobile and gendered economies that embraced female agriculture and gathering of wild foodstuff with male hunting and fishing in the interior and coastal waterways. Dense networks of trade connected them to each other and to Native peoples from elsewhere. Common group ownership of the land helped define Native senses of identity and of place, and a complex usufruct system whereby needs shaped land usage without conveying outright ownership of the land to individuals. Indians possessed deeply rooted histories transmitted principally in the oral tradition that tied them to their homelands, elaborate cultures that made them distinctive, and a rich spiritual and ceremonial calendar that defined their place in the created world. (3)
Jean M O'Brien Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (2010)