1 - How to Read Things That Weren’t Written Down in Early America

Summary

Most communications in early colonial America were not written down. Even if, following recent scholarly trends, we understand the Western notion of “writing” broadly – as including all forms of inscribed human communication – nonverbal exchanges still carry most of our human-to-human signals. How, then, do we study early American interactions between Natives and newcomers if so much of what we must rely upon as analysts goes unspoken? This chapter describes the methodological and ethical challenges of early colonial North American historiography based on other-than-linguistic evidence in three media domains: Indigenous media of the colonial era; human relations to and movement in landscape; and the environment as an agential force.