Historic Contact: Indian People and Colonists in Today's Northeastern United States in the Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract

Historic Contact summarizes some of the results of European interaction with Native Americans from earliest encounters through approximately the American War for Independence in the area now called the Northeastern United States. It does not include adjacent portions of Canada. The author has arranged his account of culture contact into thirty-four regions, or Indian countries. For example, he identifies countries such as the Eastern Abenaki, Mohegan-Pequot, Seneca, and Powhattan. He uses the same chronological format (by century, from the sixteenth through the eighteenth) to outline evidence for contact in each country. Grumet surveyed an enormous literature, including unpublished materials, and his synthesis of the archaeological and historical evidence for culture contact in these regions seems remarkably accurate and up to date. According to the foreword by Francis Jennings, the bibliography contains 1,111 entries. But this is only a fraction of the pertinent literature. For example, the bibliography for the Smithsonian Handbook of North American Indians: Northeast (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, 1978) includes over 3,000 entries. Parenthetically, Grumet's Historic Contact overlaps, replicates, or augments much of the aforementioned Smithsonian volume.

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