Description: "Jessica Taylor traces the ways in which English colonizers grafted their ways of ordering space atop Powhatan-ordered space in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake. As she argues, Natives and newcomers found landscapes mutually understandable, and this manuscript follows English and Algonquian attempts, from the quotidian to state-level initiatives, to capitalize on mobility along paths and rivers, and police legal and physical boundaries. This manuscript focuses on landscape and uses material culture and archaeology sources throughout, thus taking an interdisciplinary approach to recover everyday colonial experience and render earliest contact between Indigenous nations and English settlers in what became Virginia and Maryland in an entirely new light"--
Review Quotes:
There is much to admire about this book, including the quality of the research--the excellent use of archaeology, both published studies and unpublished site reports, is especially commendable--and the persuasiveness of its arguments. Taylor has made several signal contributions to long-standing historiographical debates.
--Matthew Kruer, University of Chicago, author of Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America