Summary: This week on Fieldstone Common, Marian Pierre-Louis interviews Lucianne Lavin, author of Connecticut's Indigenous Peoples: What Archeology, History, and Oral Traditions Teach Us About Their Communities and Their Cultures. More than 10,000 years ago, people settled on lands that now lie within the boundaries of the state of Connecticut. Leaving no written records and scarce archaeological remains, these peoples and their communities have remained unknown to all but a few archaeologists and other scholars. This pioneering book is the first to provide a full account of Connecticut’s indigenous peoples, from the long-ago days of their arrival to the present day. Lucianne Lavin draws on exciting new archaeological and ethnographic discoveries, interviews with Native Americans, rare documents including periodicals, archaeological reports, master’s theses and doctoral dissertations, conference papers, newspapers, and government records, as well as her own ongoing archaeological and documentary research. She creates a fascinating and remarkably detailed portrait of indigenous peoples in deep historic times before European contact and of their changing lives during the past 400 years of colonial and state history. Lucianne Lavin is Director of Research and Collections at the Institute for American Indian Studies, a research museum and educational center in Washington, CT. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from NY University. She is an archaeologist who has over 30 years of research and field experience in Northeastern archaeology and anthropology. Dr. Lavin has written over 100 professional publications and technical reports on the archaeology and ethnohistory of the Northeast. For more details and upcoming schedule see: http://www.FieldstoneCommon.com
