Englishman Thomas Mayhew, Sr. led the first permanent settlement on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in 1643. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, generations of the Mayhew family operated as missionaries to the Wampanoag people on whose homelands they had settled, but as colonial leaders they also frequently interacted with Native people in all matters related to politics, the economy, and legal affairs including land transfers. Recent archaeological investigations within the Mayhew’s homestead lot documented an extensive Native habitation area, components of which may be contemporaneous with the colonists. This paper explores interpretations of Native and European cultural exchange and mobility during a highly dynamic period of the island’s history.

In 1703 John and Lydia Sprague and their children left their home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, to establish new lives in the frontier town of Lebanon, Connecticut. Excavation of the ca. 1705-1750s house of their son, Captain Ephraim Sprague and his wife Deborah Woodworth, is providing detailed insights into how Puritan families adapted to the New England frontier through their architecture, foodways, household crafts, military service, and contact with missionaries and local Indigenous people. The Sprague Site encapsulates this dynamic yet still poorly understood period, which historian Richard Bushman has called the transition “From Puritan to Yankee.” Within his lifetime, however, Capt. Sprague witnessed his siblings and then his children and their families leaving Lebanon to establish new homesteads and communities in the region’s northern and western frontiers, a pattern that would be repeated by thousands of families for generations, ultimately ending at the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

Throughout the Colonial Period in New England (1620-1776), wild and cultivated plants were a critical piece of the survival puzzle. As colonists began to settle into the land that would become their home, they experimented with transplanting and sowing familiar crops and herbs from Europe. While some would eventually take root successfully in New England soil, the English also found themselves relying on, and enjoying, wild plants and cultigens introduced to them through interactions with Indigenous peoples–some of which were mistaken for European botanical cousins. Furthermore, this successful strategy of adapting European crops and adopting local plants into colonial diets provided a necessary foundation for the English to spread across the mainland. This cross-temporal comparison of macrobotanical assemblages recovered at two 17th-century and three 18th-century sites excavated by Archaeological and Historical Services, Inc. highlights the importance of plants and Indigenous knowledge in the success of English colonization in New England.

The Dorothy Quincy Homestead in Quincy, Massachusetts, was first settled by Edmund Quincy I in 1635, and it was occupied by successive generations of the Quincy family until the late eighteenth century. The Homestead became a tenant farm in the nineteenth century and was transformed into a historic house museum in the twentieth century. Excavations conducted on the property in 2021 and 2025 verified that the site contains the buried remains of the 1635 Edmund Quincy I House and identified artifact deposits associated with the Homestead’s seventeenth- through nineteenth-century occupation and use. The excavations also identified the original landscape surface on the property and various fill deposits that had been used to alter the property. The investigations have allowed for an examination of property’s use and the transformation of the landscape as it transitioned from a large estate to a tenant farm and finally to a historic site.

In Colonial and Early-American New Jersey, people, products, and even whole buildings were on the move. The Mount Bethel Meeting House was constructed in 1761 and moved in 1786 to its current location in Warren Township, New Jersey. Excavations outside the main façade of the structure found a series of stratigraphic levels, each with notable changes in the window glass assemblage. These changes track the history of window glass production in the state, which began in 1739 with the Wistarburgh Glassworks in Alloway, New Jersey, and continued with an array of operations throughout the southern portion of the state up until the Civil War.

An archaeological survey in Jackson Township, New Jersey, located in the Pinelands, discovered a late 19^th to early 20^th century dump consisting of institutional ware ceramics, glass tablewares, beer or soda bottles, and a pressed glass decanter. The assemblage, highlighted by a matching set of “Furnival’s Hotel Ware” and undecorated oval plates, was indicative of an institutional site – such as a hotel, restaurant, or worker’s housing. Historic research, however, showed no evidence of any institutions that may have housed such an assemblage within the vicinity of the project area in Jackson Township. A nearby historic mill in the Town of Van Hiseville and the historic hotels of Lakewood, New Jersey may provide some clues into the relationship between this assemblage and labor and leisure, and cranberry farms and hunting lodges in the Pinelands could offer insights into institutional assemblages of workers and vacationers.

During the late nineteenth century, Vermont’s “Copper Belt” supported an industrial community composed of miners, laborers, women, and children who lived and worked in and around the region’s copper mines. Recent archaeological investigations at two domestic structures associated with the Pike Hill Copper Mine have yielded a diverse assemblage of artifacts, including household ceramics, glassware, lighting devices, toys, and other personal items. These materials provide valuable insights into the daily routines, domestic practices, and leisure activities of mining families, with particular attention to the experiences of children engaged in industrial labor. This paper examines the history and material culture of the Pike Hill community, offering a glimpse into the social fabric and lived realities of a working-class population shaped by extractive industry.