Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Life and Death at Brothertown, An Archaeology of Endurance

兄弟城项目(克雷格·西波拉和兄弟城印第安人民族的合作)的主要目标是探索兄弟城印第安人在18世纪和20世纪之间协商他们的身份的过程。在此期间，兄弟城印第安人社区信奉基督教，采用英语，并消费了大量生产的非原住民物质文化。该项目建议，首先，检查兄弟城印第安人实施的不断变化的埋葬做法，以此作为社区身份转变的索引。其次，调查导致这种身份变化的住宅和土地使用模式。为了实现这些目标，兄弟城项目将绘制纽约和威斯康星州所有已知的兄弟城公墓的地图，对在其中发现的所有墓碑进行分类，并使用探地雷达来探测未标记的坟墓。除了墓地分析外，还将从个人和家庭地块的空间分布角度分析兄弟城聚居地的历史地图。将这些模式与墓地中坟墓的空间分布进行比较，将提供对居住空间和墓地空间与社区内新出现的社会差异相关的方式的洞察。拟议的活动对历史考古学和墓地研究具有特殊的学术价值。本项目运用了几种新的方法和理论途径。首先，它不是只关注墓碑图像，而是将整个墓地作为一个分析单位来考虑。这包括石头的大小、形状和材质以及整体空间布局。这些额外的证据扩展了历史考古学和其他地方对墓地的经典方法。其次，本研究对墓地和居住模式进行了比较，以期获得生前兄弟城与死亡中兄弟城之间的新联系。预计这样的比较将提供新的视角，将这两种不同类型的空间并列在一起，将兄弟城社区的日常生活与纪念他们的祖先和过去的墓地联系起来。那些在18世纪形成兄弟城社区的人大多懂英语。与兄弟城有关的丰富的纪录片记录在美洲原住民历史方面是罕见的，这些历史通常基于口头和民族历史记录。就殖民和后殖民背景下土著人民的人类学和考古学而言，兄弟城背景所允许的“局内人”视角可能会揭示殖民和后殖民社会谈判的复杂性，它肯定会允许对正在分析的墓地和居住模式进行更微妙的解释。在最广泛的意义上，这个项目将对人类学和其他社会科学研究物质文化和大众消费感兴趣，因为它探索了一个特定社区在转变其纪念做法以纳入大规模生产的墓碑时所经历的社会转型。拟议的项目对兄弟镇印第安人和威斯康星州历史悠久的兄弟镇的许多非土著居民也很重要，因为它将保护墓碑上的历史信息，并提高公众对当地历史的认识。

The main objective of the Brothertown Project (a collaboration between Craig Cipolla and the Brothertown Indian Nation) is to explore the processes by which the Brothertown Indians negotiated their identities between the 18th and 20th centuries. During this period, the Brothertown Indian community embraced Christianity, adopted the English language, and consumed an abundance of mass-produced non-Native material culture. The project proposes, first, to examine the changing burial practices implemented by the Brothertown Indians as an index of the community's shifting identity. Second, to investigate the residential and land-use patterns that contributed to this changing identity. To accomplish these objectives, the Brothertown Project will map all known Brothertown cemeteries in New York and Wisconsin, catalogue all gravestones found within, and use ground penetrating radar to detect unmarked graves. In addition to the cemetery analysis, historic maps of the Brothertown settlements will be analyzed in terms of spatial distributions of individual and family plots. The comparison of these patterns with the spatial distributions of graves in cemeteries will offer insights into the ways that lived spaces and cemetery spaces related to emerging social distinctions within the community. The proposed activity has specific intellectual merit for historical archaeology and cemetery studies. This project makes use of several new methods and theoretical approaches. First, instead of focusing only on gravestone iconography, it takes the entire cemetery into account as a unit of analysis. This includes stone sizes, shapes, and materials along with overall spatial layouts. These additional lines of evidence expand on classic approaches to graveyards in historical archaeology and elsewhere. Second, this study compares cemetery and residential patterns in order to gain new links between Brothertown in life and Brothertown in death. It is anticipated that such a comparison will offer new perspectives by juxtaposing these two distinct types of spaces, linking the everyday life of the Brothertown community to the cemeteries that commemorated their ancestors and their pasts.Those that formed the Brothertown community in the 18th century were mostly literate in the English language. The rich documentary record associated with Brothertown is rare in terms of Native American histories which are typically based on oral and ethnohistoric records. In terms of the anthropology and archaeology of indigenous peoples in colonial and postcolonial contexts, the "insider" perspective that the Brothertown context allows will likely shed light on the complexities of colonial and postcolonial social negotiations and it will certainly allow for more nuanced interpretation of the cemetery and residential patterns under analysis. In the broadest sense, this project will be of interest to anthropological and other social scientific studies of material culture and mass consumption as it explores the social transitions one particular community went through as it transformed its commemoration practices to incorporate mass-produced gravestones. The proposed project is also important for the Brothertown Indian Nation and many non-indigenous residents of historic Brothertown, Wisconsin as it will act to preserve historic information contained on gravestones and increase public awareness of local histories.