Connecticut's Indigenous Peoples : What Archaeology, History, and Oral Traditions Teach Us about Their Communities and Cultures

More than 10,000 years ago, people settled on lands that now lie inside the boundaries of the state of Connecticut, but today these earliest residents are barely remembered. This pioneering book is the first to recount the full history of Connecticut's indigenous peoples from their arrival to the present day. Drawing on exciting new archaeological and ethnographic discoveries, interviews with Native Americans, a huge variety of published and unpublished materials, and her own ongoing archaeological and documentary research, Lucianne Lavin provides a remarkably detailed portrait of prehistoric indigenous peoples, as well as of their changing lives during the past 400 years of colonial and state history. She also includes a short study of Native Americans in Connecticut in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Lucianne Lavin is Director of Research and Collections, Institute for American Indian Studies. She is author of more than 100 articles and reports on the archaeological and ethnohistory of the Northeast, editor of the journal Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Connecticut, and co-director of the Connecticut Native American exhibition at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. She lives in Torrington, CT.