In Mohawk Country: Early Narratives of a Native People

by Dean R. Snow (Editor), William A. Starna (Editor), Charles T. Gehring (Editor)

For centuries the history of the Mohawk Valley has been shaped by the complex relationships among the valley's native inhabitants, the Mohawk Indians, and its colonists, starting with the Dutch. In Mohawk Country collects for the first time the principal documentary narratives that reveal the full scope of this Mohawk-settler interaction. Some of the sources have never before been translated into English, and several have not been previously published. Of those works that had been published, nearly all are out of print. The Mohawk location near Albany, New York put them at the center of transactions between the Iroquois and European colonists. (The Mohawk were one of the constituent nations within the League of the Iroquois.) These narratives-written by Dutch merchants, French Jesuit missionaries, English soldiers, romantic European travelers, and other literate observers-provide often biased but always fascinating accounts of the Mohawk and their valley. The reader is treated to over two centuries of history, starting with the arrival of the Dutch in the early seventeenth century to the planning of the Erie Canal in the early nineteenth century. These records bring to life the rapid changes experienced by both the Mohawk and their European neighbors. Wars, catastrophic epidemics, and the diplomacy of nearly two centuries are all well represented in this volume. Fascinating cultural differences are also the French, for example, dealt with the Mohawk much differently than the Dutch or the English. Just as importantly, these writings reveal—from the unique perspectives of the observer—the Mohawk's struggle to retain their culture in the midst of evolving political, social, and physical environments.

Genres: History

432 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1996

About the author

Dean Snow is a North American archaeologist who grew up on the southern Minnesota prairie and received his BA degree at the University of Minnesota in 1962. He gained field experience in the Midwest and Alaska there at at his graduate university, the University of Oregon. He earned a PhD there in 1964. His doctoral dissertation was based on research carried out in highland Mexico.

Snow began his research and teaching career at the University of Maine, and established the first university-based archaeological research program in that state. He moved to the University at Albany in 1969 and remained there for 26 years. The U. S. Bicentennial celebrations drew him into historical archaeology, which involved innovative and revealing excavations on the key 1777 battleground site at Saratoga, New York.

In 1982 he undertook a large multi-year project on Iroquois archaeology in New York’s Mohawk Valley, which led to new understandings of American Indian paleodemography, particularly the size of the aboriginal populations in 1492 and the ways in which epidemics later reduced them. This in turn led to multidisciplinary study of human migrations through archaeology and related disciplines.

Snow served as Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Albany three times and was an associate dean for one term. In 1995 he moved to The Pennsylvania State University and served has Head of the Department of Anthropology there from then until 2005.

More recently Snow has developed techniques for distinguishing male from female handprints at rock art sites found around the world. Development of the techniques has focused on examples in the Upper Paleolithic caves of France and Spain, but this research is also being taken up by others in North America and elsewhere.

Dean Snow won election to the presidency of the Society for American Archaeology and served 2007-2009. Working with PSU colleagues in archaeology and information technology he is using his standing in the discipline to lead the development of new “cybertools” designed to make archaeological finds and publications more accessible to scholars, students, and the general public. His most recent book, Archaeology of Native North America, is the first truly continental synthesis of North American archaeology in forty years.