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By Root 1979 0

that these languages split off from each other relatively recently. On average, Swadesh claimed, the words on the Swadesh list change at a rate of 14 percent every one thousand years. Thus if two languages have similar entries for seventy-nine of the hundred words on the Swadesh list, they broke off from a common ancestor about 1,500 years ago. Unsurprisingly, Swadesh’s ideas have been criticized. Especially implausible is the notion that linguistic change occurs at a constant, universal rate. Nonetheless researchers use glottochronology, partly because of the lack of alternatives, and partly because the basic idea intuitively seems correct (Swadesh 1971, 1952; Hymes 1971, 1960:5–6).

Glottochronological analysis of Algonquian languages: Fiedel 1987; Goddard 1978; Mulholland 1985.

Diverse New England communities: This description relies on the surveys of evidence in Petersen and Cowrie 2002; Bragdon 1996:55–79 (“no name,” 58–59). Bragdon (1996:39) adopts the term “conditional sedentism” for the coastal communities (coined in Dunford 1992). For the growth of coastal communities, see Robinson 1994. In the past, some have argued that coastal Indians practiced little agriculture (Ceci 1990a), but Petersen and Cowrie assemble evidence to refute this.

Coastal diet: Little and Schoeninger 1995; Kavasch 1994.

Description of Patuxet: Author’s visit; James ed. 1963:7 (“Pleasant for air,” alewives), 75–76; Winslow 1963b:8–43; Anon. ed. 1963:xx–xxi (map of area in 1613 by Champlain). In these years big areas along the coastline had neatly planted maize fields, traces of which survived even into the twentieth century (Delabarre and Wilder 1920:210–14).

Wetus, meals, and domestic style: Morton 1637:24–26; Wood 1977:86–88, 112 (“warmer,” 112); Bragdon 1996:104–07; Gookin 1792:149–51 (“so sweet,” 150–51). “The best sort” of wetus, Gookin said, were “covered very neatly, tight, and warm, with barks of trees”—“warm as the best English houses” (150). Clearly, the homes of the wealthy in England were not leaky or drafty, but in that deforested land even the rich could not afford the plentiful fires that kept Indians warm (Higginson 1792:121–22).

2,500 calories/day: Bennett 1955:table 1; Braudel 1981–84 (vol. 1):129–45 (European calorie levels).

Indian and European views on children: Kuppermann 2000:153–56; Williams 1936:29 (spoiling); Denys 1908:404; Ariés 1962 (European views).

Games: Wood 1977:103–06.

Character, training, and pniese: Salisbury 1989:229–31; Wood 1977:91–94 (“He that speaks,” 91; “Beat them,” 93 [I have modernized “winch,” an obsolete form of “flinch”]); Winslow 1624:55–56; James ed. 1963:77; Kittredge ed. 1913:151, quoted in Axtell 1981:44.

Sachems: Wood 1977:97–99; Winslow 1624:56–60; Gookin 1792:154–55; Salisbury 1982:42–43; Dunford 2001:32–37; Johnson 1993:chap. 3. To the north, sachems were called sagamores, a distinction I am ignoring.

Population increase, attendant social change, and rise of political tensions: On the one hand, there is surprisingly little archaeological evidence for coastal agriculture (Ceci 1990a); on the other, there are multiple colonial reports that the seacoast was thick with farms. This scenario is an attempt to reconcile the apparently contradictory evidence (Bragdon 1996:146–53). See also Johnson 1993:chap. 3; Thomas 1979:24–44 (“The political scene,” 30); Metcalf 1974; and esp. Petersen and Cowrie 2002.

Indigenous warfare as less bloody: Hariot 1588:36–37; Williams 1936:188 (“farre less”); Hirsch 1988; Kuppermann 2000:106–09; Russell 1980:187–94; Vaughan 1995:37–41. One reason for the low casualties, Williams observed, was that Indians fought “with [so much] leaping and dancing, that seldome an Arrow hits.” (Evidently, the games of archery dodgem paid off.) Some activists have claimed that scalping was actually invented by white colonists. But European visitors witnessed the practice in the 1530s and 1540s, before any colonies existed north of Florida. “Hanging, disemboweling, beheading, and drawing and quartering were commonplace”