Aspects of continuity and change in colonial Dutch material culture at Fort Orange, 1624-1664

Fort Orange, built by the Dutch West India Company in 1624, was the center of a prosperous agricultural region and focal point of Dutch trade and contact with the Indians until the English took New Netherland in 1664. In 1676 the English abandoned Fort Orange to build a new fort elsewhere; after 1790, the city of Albany, N.Y., expanded over the site, covering and partially destroying the archeological evidence of Fort Orange during subsequent urban development. Remains of a part of the site were uncovered and carefully recorded during a five-month rescue excavation project in 1970 and 1971 preceding new highway construction. This work produced clearly documented 17th century Dutch cultural material from before 1664 in New Netherland for study, quantitative analysis, and comparison with material excavated from other 17th century aboriginal and European sites. Research questions focus on the transplantation and adaptation of Dutch material culture to New Netherland and the extent of its influence in other cultures. The excavation provided information on the size of the fort and dimensions of features within, use of the south moat as a tavern dump, changing diet of fort occupants, methods of construction of houses, types of furnishings and diversity of material culture, continuing function of the site as a crossroads for trade since prehistoric times, and changing trade relationships between Fort Orange, other sites in North America, and sites across the Atlantic. Isolated 150 miles from New Amsterdam (New York City) and the Atlantic Ocean, far up a tidal river which froze solid in the winter, the Dutch at Fort Orange by 1664 nevertheless had established a highly Europeanized material culture comparable in its completeness to that of the fatherland in the 17th century Dutch Golden Age. When the English took New Netherland, they acquired a colony that was no mere frontier outpost but which embodied a material culture almost as fully as sophisticated as that of the villages and farms of the mid-17th century Netherlands. It is from this basis that the phenomenon of Anglo-Dutch acculturation in New York after 1664 must be studied