The Development of Contact Period Archaeology in Southern New England and Long Island: From Gee Whiz! to Say What?

It seems that contemporary archaeologists of the Contact Period continue a long tradition of uncritical acceptance of the written word as God\u27s truth, to be tested against or to inform the incomplete and necessarily biased archaeological record. When documentary history is available, have archaeologists really progessed so little- from excited discoveries of the antiquarians ( gee whiz ) to mere confirmation of written accounts ( so what )? No. This paper argues that archaeologists, working as anthropologists and in conjunction with historians, have been producing new, more critical social analyses of the 17th-century culture contact situation in New England