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By Root 1878 0

explore Tisquantum’s motives, especially when they accused him of scheming to better his station. But they did not, in modern terms, try to put themselves in his place, which is what is at issue here. Nor did the colonists puzzle over why they never suffered a sustained attack, to judge by the lack of discussion by Bradford, Winslow et al. Here one cannot charge the colonists with special insensitivity. Compared to later historians, Pilgrim writers were more likely to see Indians as independent actors with their own beliefs and goals (Kuppermann 2000:2–4).

“Divine providence”: Gookin 1792:148.

Dissatisfied historians: For a survey of ethnohistory’s origins, see Axtell 1978.

Explosion of research: Author’s interviews, Axtell, Neal Salisbury; Chaplin 2003:esp. 1445–55 (“No other field,” 1431).

Squanto as devil: Shuffelton 1976. Tisquantum, according to a Massachusett dictionary, is a variant of musquantum, “he is angry.” When Indians had accidents, according to Roger Williams, the minister and linguist who founded Rhode Island, “they will say, God was angry and did it; musquantum manit, God is angry” (cited in Shuffelton 1976:110).

Norumbega: D’Abate 1994; Parkman 1983 (vol. 1):155. The term referred vaguely to a mythical city, the river that supposedly reached it, and the region around the river, all somewhere in the Northeast.

Patuxet population: A vexing question. Tisquantum is said to have claimed it had two thousand souls (James ed. 1963:29). According to the most widely cited colonial observer, Daniel Gookin, the Wampanoag federation, of which Patuxet was a member, “could raise, as the most credible and ancient Indians affirm, about three thousand men” (Gookin 1792:148). If the federation were able to muster three thousand adult males, then typical population estimates for the whole would be on the order of twelve to fifteen thousand. The Wampanoag had about a dozen settlements, which would suggest that Patuxet may have had a thousand inhabitants, or maybe a few more. Countering this, anthropologist Kathleen Bragdon argues the available archaeological evidence suggests that individual coastal settlements like Patuxet held “probably no more than two hundred people” (Bragdon 1996:58). I have accepted Gookin’s figure because it was apparently derived from contemporaneous Indians themselves, and because the archaeological traces, as Bragdon herself notes, are difficult to interpret.

Names and distribution of Indian groups: Most historical accounts rely on Gookin (1792:147–49), including the standard reference, Salwen (1978:160–76). See also Bragdon 1996:20–25; Russell 1980:19–29; Salisbury 1982:13–30 passim; Vaughan 1995:50–58.

Dawnland: Stewart-Smith 1998:49.

Slow movement into New England: Bragdon 1996:57–58 (salt marshes, 1000 B.C.); Wilkie and Tager eds. 1991:10–11 (maps of distribution through time of known paleo-Indian archaeological sites); Fagan 2000:101–04 (low carrying capacity of postglacial areas); Petersen 2004. On a continental scale, the New England indigenous groups were so small that one conscientious continental survey doesn’t even mention them (Fagan 1991).

Patchwork environment: Cronon 1983:19–33 (“tremendous variety,” 31).

Glottochronology: Glottochronology was invented in the 1960s by U.S. linguist Morris Swadesh, a controversial figure who spent much of his career in Mexico after his colorful political views cost him his passport during the McCarthy period. The technique was the subject of his posthumously printed magnum opus, The Origin and Diversification of Language (Swadesh ed. 1971). Glottochronology tries to ascertain how long ago two languages diverged from a common ancestor language, as French and Italian did from Latin. To accomplish this, Swadesh drew up a list of one hundred basic terms, such as “ear,” “mother,” and “vomit.” When two languages are closely related, Swadesh argued, their words for these terms will resemble each other. For example, the French and Italian for “ear” are oreille and orecchio, terms similar enough to suggest