Paper short abstract:

Integrating colonial records (17th-18th cen.), archaeological and ethnohistorical data, we provide historical context for interpreting and ultimately preserving Indigenous stone landscapes in the Minisink region of today's New Jersey, USA.

Paper long abstract:

The highland region known as Minisink (today northwestern New Jersey, USA), is well known among archaeologists and Munsee-Lenape communities as an important Indigenous place, featuring a complex of stone landscapes. Here we examine colonial sources from Dutch, Swedish, and English writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to provide historical context for interpreting and ultimately preserving these sites. We suggest that the Minisink region emerged as a borderland beyond the periphery of imperial knowledge but still recorded in visual and written colonial documents. Reliant upon Indigenous informants, colonists represented Minisink as a site of speculation and potential mineral wealth. As colonial violence destabilized the wider region, Minisink’s unknowns became a source of anxiety and a real threat to colonists. Bringing together colonial speculations, Indigenous refusals, ethnohistoric and archaeological data, we re-read this borderland as a record of Indigenous land defense that suggests the significance of ceremonial landscapes to Munsee peoples.