Village

Although we have documentary evidence of indigenous villages existing in Connecticut at the time of European arrival, actual physical evidence in the form of archaeological remains is much harder to obtain.  IAIS Director of Research, Dr. Lucianne Lavin, discusses this in what she calls The Village Problem:

“Several noted New England archaeologists have claimed that there is yet no archaeological evidence for villages. Given the evidence for geographic diversity in earlier cultural periods, village life could be absent from some parts of southern New England, but as Dr. Peter Thorbahn has noted, ‘the absence of evidence … cannot be taken to be evidence of absence.’ Several explanations have been given for this absence in certain areas: (1) the village locations were also desirable to European settlers, and towns may now sit on the remains of the Native villages; (2) village sites have been erased by hundreds of years of farming, industrial development, and urban sprawl; and (3) New England ‘villages’ may have consisted of a small cluster of houses that left only a fain archaeological footprint.”

[Connecticut’s Indigenous Peoples: What Archaeology, History, and Oral Traditions Teach Us About Their Communities and Cultures, Lucianne Lavin, PhD. Yale University Press, 2013, page 179.]