Society for American Archaeology Scholarly Book Award
 
Collaborative archaeological projects focused on the Nipmuc people of New England that offer a model for research incorporating Indigenous knowledge and scholarship
 

“Excellent. . . . Based on archival research, oral history, and archaeological excavation and analyses of three sites centered around the Nipmuc people in southern New England, the text . . . tell[s] the stories of both the historical events and the work to understand them.”—Choice
 
“Using multidisciplinary approaches to documents, oral accounts, material remains, and cultural landscapes . . . from a Native perspective, the authors braid together a cohesive understanding of a Nipmuc presence in their traditional homelands. . . . Aa history that does more than reveal the past: it paves the way for the future.”—American Antiquity  
 
“A rich and humanistic story of Nipmuc continuance in New England since the 1600s. . . . Offers an in-depth account of silenced regional histories in the heart of the American empire and gestures towards futurity as a major theoretical intervention for collaborative and decolonizing archaeologies.”—Historical Archaeology
 
“Should be read by all archaeologists . . . because it lays out how archaeologists can, and should, build long-term collaborative relationships with Indigenous communities . . . It is a model for decolonizing archaeology. Archaeology needs this book.”—American Indian Culture and Research Journal   
 

“Deftly weaves historic records and archaeological research through an Indigenous lens to create a well-crafted story of the Nipmuc of New England. Through this lens, the reader will better recognize the struggles Indigenous people faced in colonial America as well as the struggles they continue to face as they try to reestablish their sovereign relationships with the United States.”—Joe Watkins, coeditor of Challenging the Dichotomy: The Licit and the Illicit in Archaeological and Heritage Discourses  
 
“Demonstrates how genuinely inclusive archaeology can and should be. The complicated and long underappreciated histories of New England’s Native Nipmuc people are brought to life through the wholly compelling narratives of Nipmuc individuals from the seventeenth century to the present carefully pieced together from traditional knowledge, fragments of pottery and stone, snippets of documents, and the physical traces of meaningful spaces and places.”—Audrey Horning, coeditor of Becoming and Belonging in Ireland AD c. 1200–1600: Essays in Identity and Cultural Practice  
 
Highlighting the strong relationship between New England’s Nipmuc people and their land from the pre-contact period to the present day, this book helps demonstrate that the history of Native Americans did not end with the arrival of Europeans. This is the rich result of a twenty-year collaboration between indigenous and nonindigenous authors, who use their own example to argue that Native peoples need to be integral to any research project focused on indigenous history and culture.  
 
The stories traced in this book center around three Nipmuc archaeological sites in Massachusetts—the seventeenth century town of Magunkaquog, the Sarah Boston Farmstead in Hassanamesit Woods, and the Cisco Homestead on the Hassanamisco Reservation. The authors bring together indigenous oral histories, historical documents, and archaeological evidence to show how the Nipmuc people outlasted armed conflict and Christianization efforts instigated by European colonists. Exploring key issues of continuity, authenticity, and identity, Historical Archaeology and Indigenous Collaboration provides a model for research projects that seek to incorporate indigenous knowledge and scholarship.  
 
D. Rae Gould, a member of the Hassanamisco Nipmuc Band, Massachusetts, is executive director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University. Holly Herbster is principal investigator and senior archaeologist at the Public Archaeology Laboratory. Heather Law Pezzarossi is assistant professor of anthropology at Syracuse University. Stephen A. Mrozowski, professor of anthropology and director of the Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston, is the author of The Archaeology of Class in Urban America.

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