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We helped test and excavate areas in the homelands of the Weantinock Indians in New Milford, CT. Over the past 200 years, many of their homelands have been destroyed by urbanization and by the illegal potting of sites by treasure hunters! Our work was supported by local landowners and by the Office of State Archaeology. Dr. Nick Bellantoni came out to our site to confer, as did Mr. Jim Morasco, a former student and former President of the Archaeological Society of Connecticut. Dr. Weinstein, along with Ms. Deseree Heme (a former student) have been writing the ethnohistory of the Weantinock Indians. My C.V. lists the presentations and publications under review on this all-important ethnohistory.
WestConn’s 2004 summer field school in archaeology recently completed limited testing and excavation of a flat grassy meadow just north of the orchards. The attached topographic map shows the location of our summer dig. Our work supports Mr. Morasco’s data. The projectile point styles tentatively indicate a Late Archaic through Middle to Late Woodland cultural time periods: Brewerton eared/corner notched points (Late Archaic), and Lamoka and Squibnocket points (Late Archaic through Middle to Late Woodland).
We also had charcoal staining (Feature 1) associated with two post mold features (Features 2 and 3) in one area (Transect 1, Test Pit 2) and pottery. We sent out the charcoal for dating, but the pottery and the Lamoka point styles from the same soil level indicate that we definitely have a Woodland component. We will have an expert on pottery styles (Dr. Lucianne Lavin) examine the ceramics to give us a more positive Woodland identification. We also found two other post mold stain features from Transect 2, Test Pit 2, (Feature 4), and Transect 3, Test Pit 1, (Feature 5). All features and the bulk of the artifacts come from the interface of the two sub-soils, at approximately 18+ cm below surface.
Our archaeological methods were based on a short, five-week field season with 9 beginning students. We created three transects that ran parallel across the flat terrace. We dug 11, 50 cm. square test pits every 10 meters along Transects 1 and 2. Because of the wealth of materials that we were finding at two test pits (TP 2 on both Transects 1 and 2), we opened up block excavations at these two locations. We also ran a shorter transect, Transect 3, and dug 7 test pits at 5 meter intervals. We dug test pits at 5 m levels in order to better test the area and pick up materials and features that we might otherwise have missed.
We screened all our materials in 1/8” screens. We used small wire mesh because we were picking up hundreds of tiny retouch flakes; such flakes would have fallen through the usual ¼” mesh. We took soil samples from several test pits and we will identify the strata using a Munsell soil book. We also did a flotation analysis on a soil/charcoal sample from Feature 1, a charcoal stain in Transect 1, Test Pit 2. We sent out the dried floral matter for identification. The charcoal stain did not have the typical bowl-shape design often found at other archaeological sites; we pedestalled the feature, bisected it and bagged the contents for floatation and radio carbon dating. The charcoal has been sent to Beta Analytic for dating.
My very general interpretation of the WestConn site is as follows:
Dr. Laurie Weinstein is Professor Emeritus at WCSU Anthropology. Although she is retired, she still teaches for the Department and handles the Permaculture Garden logistics or everything from grant-writing to managing the student interns and networking with the food pantries in the Danbury region. The Permaculture Garden was her initiative when she was Chair of the JGC. When she is not working at WCSU, she is writing her books about Native England (Between Two Rivers and Two Wars: Western New England in the 18th century with Dr. Lucianne Lavin, for U of Arizona Press) and managing a major series for the U of Arizona Press. Weinstein also started the Archaeology Program and CRM minor at WCSU and she still consults with state officers, local museums, and historical societies about regional culture history. In particular, she is active with the Institute for American Indian Studies in Washington, CT. Dr. Weinstein has a lot of pets and helps to rehab small animals up in Massachusetts where she lives.
Dr. Christine Hegel holds an M.Phil. and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She teaches courses on economic and legal anthropology, public anthropology, qualitative research methods, and the Middle East, among others. In 2017, Hegel received the CSCU Board of Regents Award for Teaching Excellence. Her current research project examines and contributes to the fight for livelihood rights for waste pickers (also called canners/informal recyclers/micro-haulers), for which she conducts field research in Brooklyn, New York and collaborates with local and global organizations. Prior collaborations have taken her to Finland to study hockey workers as part of research on Arctic economies, and she has undertaken a number of projects since 2012 focused on the intersections between design and anthropology. Her recent co-authored book, Ethnography by Design: Scenographic Experiments in Fieldwork, (2019, Routledge) with George E. Marcus and Luke Cantarella, offers a model for using design thinking and methods for ethnographic research. She has been awarded research grants from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Fulbright Commission to conduct ethnographic research in Cairo and Port Said, Egypt, on on the use of legal fictions to reconfigure debt relations. Hegel has authored essays for the edited volumes Collaborative Anthropology Today: A Collection of Exceptions (2021, Cornell University Press) Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa Into the New Millennium (2013, Indiana University Press) and Family Law in the Muslim World (2016, I.B. Tauris) and articles, essays, and reviews in The Anthropology of Work; Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference; American Anthropologist; Cultural Anthropology; Anthropological Quarterly; and Law, Culture, and Humanities Journal. Her website is http://christinehegel.com/wp/
Dr. Jessica Anderson Schofield earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Missouri in 2017 and a B.A. in Global Studies and Political Science from South Dakota State University. She specializes in the study of international relations and comparative politics. Her research focuses primarily on issues relating to international human rights and enforcement of human rights law through international courts, and she is currently working on a project examining allegations of African bias in the International Criminal Court. Dr. Schofield also conducts research on topics relating to women’s rights, political violence, and African politics. She has presented her research at numerous national and international conferences, and her work on human rights theory has been published in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Empirical International Relations Theory.
Dr. Manoj Misra earned a PhD in Sociology from the University of Alberta, Canada. Before joining this university, he was an Assistant Professor of Sustainable Development at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, Republic of Korea. After the completion of his PhD, Dr. Misra was invited as a visiting research fellow at the Agrarian Alternatives cluster at Heidelberg University, Germany. His writings have won best graduate paper awards at the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development. He has published research articles in top-tier academic journals including in the Journal of Agrarian Change, Agriculture and Human Values, and Climate and Development. He also regularly writes in newspapers and magazines. His research interests are agrarian change and food sovereignty, energy issues and climate justice, and development dispossession in South Asia.
Dr. Carina Bandhauer, Professor of Sociology, earned a Ph.D. at Binghamton University in 2001. She specializes in the sociology of racism, immigration, Latino/a/x studies, and globalization with a regional specialization in Latin America. Her research focus is on the study of racism, the anti-immigrant movement, international migration and globalization. Bandhauer is committed to teaching, researching and working to achieve social justice through awareness. Dr. Bandhauer founded Undocumented Student Services at WCSU in 2017 in conjunction with Connecticut Students for a Dream, and coordinates the UndocuAlly Task Force. In 2020 she co-founded and now co-chairs the Racial Justice Coalition. Dr. Bandhauer has ongoing partnerships with humanitarian groups in El Salvador where she has worked with rural communities since 1993. Dr. Bandhauer served as creative consultant for the production of the film, “El Pueblo Unido,” which documented her work in El Salvador and premiered at the Montreal Film Festival in 2004. Dr. Bandhauer hosts a variety of alternating speakers series on campus including a Latinx Speakers Series; an Undocumented Speakers Series; a Racial Justice Speakers series; a Transnational Families Speakers Series; and a geographically rotating International Social Sciences Symposium. Please feel free to email to find out what’s on the horizon!
