New Netherland, tucked between New England and the Chesapeake along the Atlantic seaboard of North America, existed for roughly 50 tumultuous years before succumbing to Great Britain's colonial ambitions. Despite its brief history, New Netherland has long been of interest to historians. With Craig Lukezic and John T. McCarthy's fine book, its archaeology has finally come of age. This handsome edited volume brings together 14 chapters exploring the archaeological history of New Netherland. It is a major contribution to the archaeology of the region, with chapters that cover a wide variety of topics—from the mundane (marbles), to the curious (wolf traps), to the magisterial (Fort New Gothenburg and the Printzhof). It should be on the bookshelves of all scholars working in this region.
The Archaeology of New Netherland is introduced by coeditors McCarthy and Lukezic, who provide a capsule history of the Dutch colonial enterprise and situate New Netherland geographically. The first chapter, “Why the Dutch?” by Charles T. Gehring, introduces the West India Company and its seventeenth-century possessions. Gehring orients readers to the fortuitous set of geographic, commercial, political, and religious circumstances that facilitated the rise of the Netherlands to a position of extraordinary commercial success. New Netherland, first recognized as a distinct area in the second decade of the seventeenth century, was a critical component of this enterprise. The authors of the volume also highlight how relations with Indigenous people shaped New Netherland, as did interactions with other colonial powers, such as the Swedes. Ultimately, England found New Netherland too rich a plum to resist, and Great Britain seized the Dutch colony in 1664.
The book is organized into four major sections: an introduction, a section on sites on the “North” (Hudson) River, a section on sites along the “South” (Delaware) River, and a section with chapters on material culture. Included in the introductory section is a chapter by Marijn Stolk on ceramics from cesspit assemblages in the Netherlands proper. It provides an excellent overview of Dutch material culture from the seventeenth century, but it might have been a better fit within the volume in the section of chapters about artifact analyses.
The section on the North River includes a summary chapter by Ian Burrow on the archaeology of New Netherland in New Jersey. It discusses several of the region's early Dutch communities and their archaeological potential. These include Burlington Island, Fort Nassau, Pavonia, Achter Col, and Bergen. Heading north into the Hudson Valley, chapters by Adam Luscier and Matthew Kirk explore a Dutch trading post and a neighboring Mahican settlement on Van Schaick Island in New York State. Michael T. Lucas and Kristina S. Traudt provide a richly contextualized exploration of a mid-seventeenth century drinking house at Fort Orange, the location of modern Albany, New York. Zooarchaeologist Marie-Lorraine Pipes provides a useful synthesis of Dutch faunal remains from seventeenth-century sites in the Albany region. She deftly weaves together historic sources and faunal remains to illustrate the varied diets of the people of New Netherland in both urban and rural locations. Her work highlights how archaeology can expand on and contradict the limited written record. Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall's chapter, “Woman the Trader,” explores the often-overlooked role of Native American women as traders and culture brokers in colonial New Netherland.
The section on the Delaware River begins with a detailed study by Lu Ann De Cunzo of Tamecongh, or Aresapa—the Lenape community that became New Castle, Delaware. The growth of the community is revealed through the theoretical lens of borderlands theory. De Cunzo's chapter is part historical ethnography, part microhistory, and it explores themes of hybridity, entanglement, and innovation.
Wade P. Catts and Lukezic discuss archaeological investigations of Fort Casimir, in New Castle, Delaware. The authors do an excellent job of presenting both the previous excavations at the site by Ned Heite and colleagues, and their own groundbreaking research that has revealed intriguing traces of this key fortification, long thought to have been lost to erosion.
In his contribution, William B. Liebeknecht explores an unusual archaeological feature: a large pit, presumably employed as a wolf trap, within the larger context of colonists’ fears of wolves. This is followed by an excellent piece on Fort New Gothenburg and the Printzhof, capital of New Sweden, by Marshall Joseph Becker. Although the Swedes were usurpers in New Netherland, the stories of these two competing colonial enterprises are deeply intertwined.
The fourth section of the book includes studies by several noted artifact experts. Meta F. Janowitz and Richard G. Schaefer explore kookpotten, or grapen—the everyday ceramics of colonial New Netherland—in an article that mixes typology, foodways, art history, and culture and that should inspire further study. Paul Huey examines marbles in a thoughtful chapter that illuminates how marbles were more than simple playthings. David Furlow's sardonically titled chapter on Edward Bird's tobacco pipes, “Thank You for Smoking,” provides a rich archaeological biography of Bird, an enterprising expatriate English pipe maker whose works are found throughout New Netherland.
Lukezic, McCarthy, and their team of expert contributors have made a significant contribution to our understanding of colonial New Netherland. This is a strong volume with few faults. One hopes that the authors and their colleagues follow it with a second volume exploring the cultural legacies of New Netherland that persisted long after the West India Company's formal enterprise in North America had ceased to be.
