Borderland in the Middle: The Delaware Colony on the Atlantic Coast

Abstract

In the battle over the origins of the United States, scholars and publics have claimed primacy for the Middle Atlantic region as a central place in the mythology of the United States as a nation whose exceptionalism and greatness were destined due to the dynamic energy and creativity inherent in cross-cultural exchange. Spatially middling, the region, and in particular Delaware, was simultaneously a contested borderland with a unique, often misunderstood colonial history. So too was Sweden both the middle of Scandinavia and the northern borderland of Europe. In the early seventeenth century, Sweden’s imperialism brought the European cultural centre to the margins. This chapter explores the implications of these spatial imaginaries. The materialities of seventeenth-century imperial–colonial Sweden were both crafted in the dynamic, liminal, tweenness of borderlands in the middle.

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Introduction

I am a newcomer to Scandinavian colonialism, thanks to a serendipitous ­convergence of interests and events. I have been struggling with how to place Delaware, to theorise it spatially and culturally. Heightened interest in the seventeenth-century Delaware Valley, within the region’s archaeological and descendant communities and among a new generation of transnational historical archaeologists exploring how to situate, place, and theorise Scandinavian colonialism globally, has created new synergies and perspectives. I use this chapter as an opportunity to think New Sweden into the colonial archaeology of the Delaware Valley and more specifically that of New Castle (or actually, Tamecongh/Aresapa, Sandhoeck, Fort Casimir, Fort Trefaldighet, New Amstel, New Castle; Fig. 11.1).

Fig. 11.1

Eastern U.S. map showing New Castle, Delaware, in the Middle Colonies

New Sweden was only a “queer, little-known sidebar to history” of 17 years and a few hundred people on the colonial landscape. Small and short as it was, though, it made “surprising contributions to history” (Shorto 2004:117). Spatially, the Delaware Valley is in the middle of North America’s Middle Atlantic. But focusing on this middling has diverted us from seeing that the middle was actually a contested borderland between north and south. So too was Sweden the middle of Scandinavia in the northern Baltic borderland of Europe. Sweden’s experience on the margins of Europe, a northern state going empire in the early seventeenth century, deploying the Renaissance culture of the European centre in the margins—it’s the implications of these spatial imaginaries that I explore here. The materialities of seventeenth-century imperial–colonial Sweden were both crafted in the dynamic, liminal, tweenness of borderlands in the middle.

On Borderlands

Borderlands—place and concept—have been highly theorised over the past quarter century. Two recent publications offer points of departure to examine the definitions of borderland. Magdalena Naum (2010) brings to bear the perspective of an archaeologist, while the authors in I. William Zartman’s edited volume, Understanding Life in the Borderlands, address geography and political economy. “Borderlands”, Naum begins (2010:101), “are physically present wherever two or more groups come into contact with each other, where people of different cultural backgrounds occupy the same territory and where the space between them grows intimate”. Borders “run across land but through people”, Zartman continues. They “divide and unite, bind the interior and link with the exterior, [as] barriers and junctions, walls and doors, organs of defense and attack” (Strassoldo 1989:393 cited in Zartman 2010:6). Economic production and exchange, land ownership, social ownership (identity), rule, location and geography, language and communication, security, and pressure from central powers to act drive borderland life. Borderlands are social processes (Zartman 2010:10), “places of manifold realities” fraught with tensions and conflicts that create “fragmented landscapes” (Naum 2010:102; Zartman 2010:10). As a result, borderlands are “empowering, creating possibilities to act in ways impossible or difficult to do in other places, creating hybrid solutions pregnant with potential for new worldviews and discourses” (Naum 2010:127). In sum, Hastings Donnan and Thomas Wilson (1999) wrote that borderlands are liminal, multivocal, multilocal, dynamic, contested places in which, they add, people deploy identity strategically and situationally.

To untangle the way boundaries affect the nature of interactions among peoples, David Newman (2006:101, quoted in Gavrilis 2010:40) proposes, “it is the process of bordering, rather than the course of the line per se, which is important”. Postcolonial theories offer a conceptual toolbox for probing this bordering process. Homi Bhabha imagines such conceptual spaces as Third Spaces, places of ­translation and constant dialogue that “ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity” (Bhabha 2004:55, quoted in Naum 2010:106–107). Archaeologist Daniel Rodgers (2004:342) demands that we focus on the interaction process that defines “how meaning takes shape in relation to place, object, time, and the actor”.

Richard White emphasised the importance of such approaches to the study of seventeenth-century colonialism, during “which minor agents, allies, and even subjects at the periphery often guide[d] the course of empires” (White 1991:xi). Kent Lightfoot (2005:209) reinforced White’s argument in his critique of Eurocentric colonial models that “presume asymmetrical power relations from the very outset”. Indeed, Stoler and Cooper (1997:4) proposed, the “most basic tension of empire… is how a grammar of difference was continuously and vigorously crafted as people in colonies refashioned and contested European claims to superiority”. At times, White (1991:x) argues, a “middle ground” emerged, a space of accommodation and common meaning achieved at special moments in the processes of colonisation, a conceptual space in a physical place that challenges conventional, simplistic metaphors of acculturation and persistence. A middle ground grammar emerges when no one group is in a position to gain their ends by force and each side begins to incorporate the other into their conceptual order and then act based on these precepts of the others’ cultural premises. The “grammar of the middle” then pervaded both the rituals of everyday life and of formal diplomacy, until the time when one group could finally “invent” the other (White 1991:51–53). From her analytical place in the Arkansas Valley, however, Kathleen DuVal (2006:6–10) warns that borderlands theory has too often reproduced historical amnesia, as scholars “forget” that Indians created and contested geographic and metaphoric borders well before Europeans arrived.

Middle Ground in the European Borderland: Sweden

In 2006, Matthew Johnson asserted that a postcolonial archaeology of Europe must necessarily focus on the margins. Creating “Europe” required defining its boundaries, and the borderlands became “on the one hand, areas subject to colonial and imperial conquest, and on the other, increasingly self-conscious and aggressive “mother nations” (Johnson 2006:326–328). In Scandinavia and the larger Baltic region, this process of “making Europe” was especially extenuated and complex, involving Christianisation, new power structures, the introduction of feudalism, the foundation of towns, and technological innovation (Kala 2001:3). It transformed the region into a battleground and meeting ground for centuries.

For centuries, the region experienced cycles of war interrupted by moments of negotiated middle grounds as one aspiring power after another fought, unsuccessfully, to dominate the region. By the mid-1500s, these included Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Poland–Lithuania, Brandenburg–Prussia, and the Turkish Ottoman empire (Stadin 2001:4; Plakans 2011:86; Palmer 2006:87). From the middle of Scandinavia, Sweden came closest, disrupting the Hanseatic trading monopoly and consolidating possession south of the Gulf of Finland (Lilja 2001:53).

Near century’s end, King Carl IX initiated wars with Poland, Russia, and Denmark, forcing his son Gustav II Adolphus to conclude them in the 1610s–1620s. By then, Sweden had figuratively colonised and gained control of the entire Baltic coast down to the German Empire and cut off Russian access to the Sea (Nilsson 1988; Palmer 2006:98, 105; Plakans 2011:98). Entering the Thirty Years’ War to defeat the Catholic Habsburg Empire, Sweden became increasingly entangled with the other states of the European “centre” (Seymour 2004:205). Concurrent with this militarist expansion, the convergence of the Little Ice Age, prolonged bad weather, and poor harvests across western Europe supported Sweden’s colonialist expansion into the northland (Seymour 2004:128, 150). By the latter 1640s, Sweden was one of the most powerful European nations (Lilja 2001:51, 53). But the new empire could not consolidate its power in the inherently contested borderland geography, and within a century, its expansionist policy had failed and a new middle ground negotiated (Nilsson 1988; Stadin 2001:4; Plakans 2011:118–119).

Colonisation abroad was providing a larger canvas for Europe’s acquisitive bloodletting (Seymour 2004:125–126). In the mid-1630s, Peter Minuit, former director of New Netherland, set out to profit from Dutch-Swedish rivalry in the colonial North American trade under Swedish protection. He understood the importance of the middle Delaware Valley. For the Swedish Crown, New Sweden promised legitimacy, naval experience, and growth (Nilsson 1988). The colony was supported by 12 expeditions from the homeland over its 17-year life, ending in 1655 with Dutch annexation.

Borderland Materiality

Borderland materialities create and negotiate conscious bodies-in-places, or subjects. Processes of “creolization through ambiguity” produced hybrid persona crafted from new and recombined elements of individuals’ backgrounds, interests, and motivations (Lightfoot and Martinez 1995:479, 482–483). Nicholas Thomas wrote of the “object entanglements” of colonialism, arguing that objects “change[d] in defiance of their material stability. The category to which a thing belong[ed], the emotion and judgment it prompt[ed], and the narrative it recall[ed], [were] all historically refigured” (Thomas 1991:125).

Sweden

In the post-medieval political and economic era of state-building, social and religious ideologies served integrating functions in the forms, respectively, of “civilisation” and “reformation” (Stadin 2001:5,8). In the sixteenth century, Sweden’s first Protestant king, Gustav, promoted the latter, but left his sons to cultivate knowledge (Eriksson 1988:69). Alan Palmer (2006:91) described King Eric XIV (reigned 1560–1568) as a Renaissance Prince, the “first Swedish King to rule in splendor and fill his court at Kalmar with artists and musicians”. King Johan III’s (reigned 1568–1592) Italian mother-in-law also helped cultivate Renaissance ideas in the northern borderlands. In the seventeenth century, Swedish artists and artisans manipulated Renaissance forms and images to create imaginary worlds for their patrons, worlds pervaded with compelling symbols that glamorised and popularised the state’s growing power (Ellenius 1988:61–62).

The ship Vasa embodies the process. King Gustavus II Adolphus was at war and needed a navy that could dominate the sea. Saviour of the pure Protestant faith and descendant of the Roman emperors, the King commissioned Vasa in 1624. For the first of five large, splendid warships, Gustavus Adolphus demanded a vessel that took more than 1,000 oak trees to build, with masts over 150′ tall—a ship that took 400 workers 4 years to build. An awe-inspiring, three-dimensional, brilliantly coloured floating spectacle of Swedish aspiration, Vasa was launched with great ceremony, then capsized and sank on her maiden voyage in Stockholm harbour. Had she been seaworthy, Vasa promised an illustrious career in the theatres of war across the Baltic. The ship’s recovery and ongoing conservation give us unparalleled insight into the material dreamscapes and realities of Swedish imperialism on the eve of New Sweden (Matz 2011).

A floating allegory, Vasa deployed an array of cultural and visual languages in 500 figural sculptures and more than 200 decorative carvings (Fig. 11.2). This was no ship of the middle ground. Rather, she narrated the King’s lineage, legitimating his right, responsibility, capacity, and power to rule. Greek and Roman antiquity, the Old and New Testaments, ancient Egypt, and European fantasia merge with the Swedish royal family and nation-state to envelop the floating war machine. Hercules and 20 Roman emperors identified with Gustavus Adolphus appear side by side with idealised Italian Renaissance interpretations of antiquity, some straight from art manuals, and others translated through the aesthetic of German and Dutch artists (Soop 1986). Fabled and frightening mermaids, devils, monsters, and tritons with deep roots in European tradition identified the King as transcendent. The lion, a virtually universal symbol of royal and primal power, appears on the insides of gunport doors as well as on the figurehead and atop the rudder. The King himself ­completes the historical imaginary, portrayed atop the stern transom as a young boy being crowned by griffins representing his father, Charles IX (Matz 2011).

Fig. 11.2

Vasa from the stern, showing elaborate sculptures. (Photo by Karolina Kristensson, courtesy of National Maritime Museum)

Vasa constituted a borderland hybrid not only symbolically, but also materially. Designed and erected by Dutch shipbuilders at the Stockholm shipyard, she was commanded by a Danish captain. Latvian hemp rigging deployed her sails, fabricated from French, German, and Netherlandish materials. Ship furnishings and crew possessions also represented the diverse European locales and states upon which Sweden depended even as it competed for wealth, power, and excess (Matz 2011).

Four years after Vasa sank, in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War, King Gustavus Adolphus visited southern Germany, which the Swedes had recently taken. In Augsburg, the City Council presented him an art cabinet that more than 30 artisans had laboured 6 years to craft. Unlike Vasa, a product of borderland contention, the Augsburg cabinet represents appropriation to the borderland of the beauty and spectacle crafted in the European centre (Fig. 11.3). Reflecting the entire world, the cabinet contained approximately 1,000 objects (Cederlund and Norrby 2003), ­“virtually everything it was possible to pack into it in terms of 17th-century knowledge and objects of fantasy”. The cabinet embodied the knowledge prerequisite to power.

Fig. 11.3

The Augsburg art cabinet, Museum Gustavianum, Uppsala University, Sweden. (Photo courtesy of Uppsala University)

A baroque masterpiece, the Augsburg cabinet affords informative parallels as well as stark contrasts with Vasa. The two share allegorical themes—the Old and New Testaments, Greek and Roman mythology, the mythic sea, life and death, and the European court—and the cabinet introduces two new references to nature—the four elements and the four seasons. Like Vasa, it embodies power and control, and evokes fantasy, curiosity, awe, and admiration. Its godly artistry and creativity serve the owner’s body, intellect, and emotion (Cederlund and Norrby 2003:13). The cabinet’s form mimics the human body, composed of legs supporting the body, crowned by a head of shell, coral, and crystals. It contains bloodletting, shaving, and toilet articles to serve the body. Its clock, scientific instruments, chess set, playing cards, coins, and medals challenge the intellect, and its music box and octave virginal played the emotions.

Awash in paintings and sculpture shaped from precious metals, stones, and other exotic materials, the Augsburg cabinet literally and figuratively extends from the heights of the earth to the depths of the sea (Cederlund and Norrby 2003:13). In its form, craftsmanship, and decoration, the cabinet epitomises scientific artistic mastery and celebration of nature for useful and aestheticised ends. Moreover, its three-dimensional form hides and protects secrets, representing the power, danger, and dynamism of knowledge. It bounds, encloses, and organises its contents in the form of layered revelation exposed by action—the opening and closing of doors and drawers, the rotating corpus, and the ladder that one climbs to reach the virginal’s keyboard. The gift of the Augsburg cabinet acknowledged Sweden’s (temporary) defeat of the middle ground and the shifting of the borderland.

The northern power struggles took another material form in fortification. During the seventeenth century, to reward the aristocracy’s military service and bind them to the state, the king granted extensive estates. Familiar from their military travels with European courtly culture, Swedish nobles too imported a late Renaissance aristocratic lifestyle (Eriksson 1988:69; Revera 1988:103). Skokloster Castle, built between 1654 and 1676 by Count Carl Gustaf Wrangel, exemplifies nobles’ desire to fix, or reify, their, and Sweden’s, new place in this shifting, chaotic world. Skokloster became a mappa mundi or theatrum mundi, an enormous curiosity cabinet inspired by the King’s Augsburg cabinet and others in which microcosm reflected macrocosm (Eriksdotter and Nordin 2011:157). Crafted from materials imported from around the world, Skokloster Castle features armillary globes crowning the four towers (four “continents”), rooms named after places around the world, paintings depicting global landscapes, and collections of maps, globes, travel books, scientific instruments, and “exotic” objects (Nordin in press:3, 5). “Here in [this Third Space] at the intersection of Swedish, Scandinavian, European and Native American, African and Asian identities a space of negotiations, change and formation of identity took place” (Nordin in press:5, cites Naum 2010:106–107). At Skokloster, Wrangel preserved medieval ruins, built in historical styles, and installed a baroque garden, creating “a multi-chronological physical hybrid” of Renaissance globalism and colonialism (Nordin in press:9). The dining hall features an extraordinary stucco ceiling portraying an allegory of seventeenth-­century European colonialist world view (Nordin in press:2). Its four corners feature symbols of Europe, Africa, Asia, and America arrayed around a mythological struggle with a dragon, from whose jaws hang an awesome glass chandelier (Fig. 11.4).

Fig. 11.4

Central medallion, featuring mythological struggle with dragon, from which suspends glass chandelier installed 1672. (a) allegory of America. (b) allegory of Europe. King’s Hall stucco ceiling, Skokloster Castle, Sweden. (Photo courtesy of the author)

The Skokloster museum is a cabinet of curiosities within a cabinet of curiosities. Indeed, Eriksdotter and Nordin (2011:156) argue, collecting “sustained colonialism as a Eurocentric project”. Among its collections are items from New Sweden, believed to be Lenape gifts to the New Sweden Company, which supported the highly romanticised view of Indians that prevailed in Sweden elite circles (Losman 1988; Kylsberg 1997; Fur 2006:27–28; Nordin this volume). Like the rest of Skokloster, these collections manifest a fantasy, an imaginary, a utopia, or, rather, a dystopia (Nordin in press).

New Sweden

Homi Bhabha (1997:153) has proposed that mimicry performed an important role in support of the colonial dystopia. “Colonial mimicry”, he argued, “is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite [italics original]”. In the Middle Atlantic, Sweden’s colonists encountered the Delaware/Lenape and the Minquas/Susquehannocks. The former lived in small groups organised around tributaries of the Delaware River. Living in unfortified communities of up to 200 people near their planting fields in spring and summer, they dispersed for the winter following communal hunts (Williams 1995:113; Schutt 2007:31). The immigrant Minquas occupied a single large village fortification with smaller satellites and held land in common. By establishing trade relations with coastal European partners, they had “established themselves as the most powerful nation in the region” (Fur 2006:139). With the arrival of the Swedes, their concern was to maintain access to the coastal trade (Fur 2006:112–113).

Lenape customs set the pattern for exchange during the seventeenth-century middle ground on the Delaware. For them, land acted through its exchange, use, and users to build and renew relationships among native groups and with Europeans. Although Sweden acknowledged Indian rights to reconquest land, they consciously misinterpreted Indian conceptions of possession and use rights (Fur 2006:110–111). Lenape concern grew, as they regularly tried to explain their land tenure system at diplomatic meetings, with varying degrees of success. The Swedes interpreted grants of land made to them with no requirement of immediate payment as gifts; the Lenape understood gift reciprocity as a continuous practice in the maintenance of trade relations. European payment goods included wampum, cloth and clothing, kettles, guns and shot, alcohol, iron tools, and tobacco smoking pipes that native recipients distributed among themselves and other groups to renew and reinforce alliances (Schutt 2007:31–36).

In Ceremonies of Possession, Patricia Seed (1995:2) argued that “colonial rule over the New World was initiated through largely ceremonial practices—planting crosses, standards, banners, and coats of arms—marching in processions, picking up dirt, measuring the stars, drawing maps, speaking certain words, or remaining silent”. These practices enacted a kind of colonial mimicry the moment Europeans stepped off their ships, ritually incorporating, almost, the indigenous population and their lands into the empire. Further, European nations’ different cultural histories led them to deploy different cultural domains “in creating rights to rule the New World” (Seed 1995:6). The Spanish delivered a ritualised speech to the natives demanding submission. The French staged ritual theatre involving “elaborately orchestrated processions” (Seed 1995:42). The English, alternatively, demonstrated almost an aversion to ceremony, rather acting immediately to Anglicise the land, dividing and bounding it, building houses and planting gardens in customary ways, and “fixing” their possession through settlement (Seed 1995:17–18). The Dutch, building empire on the strength of their navigators and merchants, described and mapped to possess and appropriate (Seed 1995:13–14, 167).

Two colonial documents that suggest the distinctive Swedish ceremonies of possession are Per Lindeström’s map of the Delaware Valley and the journal of New Sweden’s last governor, Johan Risingh. Like the Dutch whose colonial model inspired their own, the Swedes possessed in part through word and image. Lindeström’s 1654 map labels more than 100 drainages, geographical features, and indigenous and European settlements between the Atlantic and the Delaware River fall line. Like the English, the Swedes also knew a need for physical possession. Their borderland history of middle grounds and conquests, however, had produced a fortified landscape, which Crown and Company reproduced on an unprecedented scale in this new, yet familiar, peripheral land. Lindeström’s map identified 23 Swedish fortifications along the roughly 35 miles of river from Salem, New Jersey, to Philadelphia! Beyond mere defence, these enclosed, defended, nationalised outposts of empire formed hyper-places through which the Swedish leadership passed, paused, and acted on ritualised journeys of possession across the colony (Fig. 11.5).

Fig. 11.5

Map of New Sweden drawn by Per Lindestrom published in Thomas Campanius Holm’s Kort beskrifning om provincien Nya Swerige uti America (1702)

Witness Governor Risingh, who upon his return to Sweden, recorded his experiences in a journal. Risingh had arrived in the colony on 20 May 1654. On his ship anchored off Fort Elfsborg, he received four Dutchmen from Fort Casimir who “kindly, offered… friendship to all the Dutch freemen…” while demanding that they yield Fort Casimir. The next day, he sailed up to Sandhook and “gave Fort Casimir the Swedish salute”, the nine Dutch soldiers defending the fort submitted, and Risingh enacted the ritual of replacing the Dutch with the Swedish flag (Dahlgren and Norman 1988:149–151, 155).

Two days later, arriving at Fort Christina, Risingh met the Dutch colonists from the Sandhook to negotiate their protection, freedom, and rights. From his base at the fort, Risingh spent the next week sending men to Virginia on behalf of the Swedish claim, dispatching a letter to Governor Stuyvesant in New Amsterdam and a ship to New England in search of food (Dahlgren and Norman 1988:155–163). Then he began a tour of the colony, first to Fort Casimir to confirm the Dutch residents’ oath of loyalty and plan for improving and renaming the Fort Trefaldighet (Trinity), “as it was deemed best to exclude all Dutch names from the Rivier” (Dahlgren and Norman 1988:167). From there he journeyed up to New Gothenburg at Tinicum, site of Printz’s manor house, up the Schuylkill to Fort Korsholm (burned by Indians after Printz’s departure), Kingsessing, and then back to Fort Christina.

He also spent June negotiating the middle ground in the borderland: Risingh met English messengers from Virginia and travelled to Tinicum to meet Lenape sachems to confirm alliance and present gifts. The war chief Nachaman responded as he hoped, “extolling with words, images, gestures and grand airs, so that we had to marvel at the Indians” (Dahlgren and Norman 1988:177). He then met with an English trader, a Susquehannock sachem, English representatives from Maryland come to present their claims to the territory, held court at Fort Trinity, received an Indian carrying a message from Manhattan about trade, held court at Tinicum, met a tobacco trader to bargain on prices, and received his representatives sent to Horn Kill to meet an Indian sachem there (Dahlgren and Norman 1988:177–187).

Edited and in places written after the demise of New Sweden, Risingh’s narrative of specific acts and events is disputed. It is the plot, however, that is significant, as Risingh recounted his traverse of the claimed lands, meeting and negotiating with the borderland actors to present claims and exchange gifts to secure the colony’s future. I wonder how he accommodated meeting rituals to those of the different cultural traditions in attendance. How did he, and his predecessors, deploy material culture in these acts of colonial and imperial mimicry?

From his experience with New Netherland, Peter Minuit had learned Indian customs and the first Swedish expedition to the Delaware arrived laden with the gifts essential to any Lenape social contract. Studies of these textiles and metal trade goods as well as unique middle ground media are untangling the contexts of use, meaning, and value that embodied the multinational, multicultural colonial exchange system along the Delaware. The most profound material of this middle ground was wampum (Nordin, this volume). Early misunderstandings, misconceptions, and cultural differences in the value of land, European goods, furs, and food induced a middle ground as groups worked to establish relationships of value favouring their goods (Fur 2006:165–167). Wampum, not a native Lenape good, was appropriated and re-imagined to meet the need. For the Europeans, it became a currency. For the native people, wampum proved and protected transactions. Beads worked into designs on belts narrated and marked important transactions; moreover, the Lenape imagined wampum a purifier that shielded them against spiritual contagion (Fur 2006:160–162). Wampum became the ultimate polyvalent object, a “kind of universal language, a way to cap joint rituals, to seal treaties, pay homage to dignitaries” (Shorto 2004:117–118), that could mean virtually whatever its holders needed it to.

Other materials further demonstrate the significance of polyvalence and mutability of meaning in creating the web of entanglements that bound borderland actors to the others they—almost—mimicked. European textile and clothing for native furs is perhaps the most obvious and ironic example. Swedish-made knee-length coats of blue and red frieze modelled after clothing produced for orphans in Stockholm became popular among prominent Lenapes as badges of position (Lindeström, cited in Fur 2006:205–206). In this case, garments that signified the ultimate dependency of parentless children—and Indians—underwent a process of cultural inversion that the Lenape may not have even realised.

In an exemplary exploration of Dutch brass and copper kettles, one of the most important trade items and quintessential object of the middle ground, Alexandra van Dongen (1996:115) argued that “Indians ‘adopted’ this mundane utensil and integrated it into their own social and material culture, bringing about wondrous changes on its form, function and symbolic meaning”. European colonisers agreed that kettles ranked high on the list of essential household items for immigrants. In seventeenth-century Dutch painting, kettles represented “female lust and seduction” as well as, in the context of the paradigmatic housewife’s obsession with cleanliness, the symbol of the clean, pure, and virginal (van Dongen 1996:129). When introduced to northeastern Algonquin and Iroquois in the sixteenth century, kettles offered a source of workable metal repurposed into jewellery, bodily ornaments, projectiles, and decorated tobacco pipes. The number appearing in graves increased beginning in the mid-1620s, as Iroquois incorporated them into burial rituals, a use comprehensible to seventeenth-century Europeans familiar with kettle drums’ role in purification rituals. Only later did Iroquois adopt kettles for cooking, ­merging the objects’ endowed ritual power with its function in survival. Toy kettles appear in Iroquoian shaman bundles, and the mythic association of the kettle and an inexhaustible food supply in Europe is reproduced in Native America (van Dongen 1996:128–129, 133; Ekengren et al. this volume).

Swedish copper fuelled the supply of copper and later brass kettles at home and in the colonies (van Dongen 1996:125). Visa Immonen (2011) has extended van Dongen’s argument about kettles as forms of colonial encounter for Sweden. On the journey founding New Sweden, Minuit presented a kettle and other gifts to a Lenape sachem for land, and the Indians specifically requested more, leading Per Lindeström to remark that “local Indian houses were full of brass and brass kettles from one door to the other, small and large” (Lindeström 1923:173, cited in Immonen 2011:376–377). In New Sweden, kettles became essential to the gift-giving process that built and maintained social relations among Indians and between Indians and Europeans. Lenape incorporated them into the Big House Ceremony and women received kettles at marriage, which many took to their grave. A prime example of the colonial process of commodification, Immomen (2011:377, 381) concludes and, I argue, of borderland appropriation and middle ground ambiguity.

Tamecongh/Aresapa, Fort Casimir, Fort Trefaldighet, New Amstel, New Castle

In 1650, the final stop on our journey through the borderlands was still a bit of sandy, marshy, riverfront Lenape real estate. The story begins the following year with a typically Stuyvesant act of provocation, ordering the Dutch Delaware River fortification moved south and across the river from Fort Elfsborg, naming it Fort Casimir at Santhoek. For the first 3 years, the Dutch settlement consisted of the fort and a row of dwellings along the riverbank. Most original settlers served in the military or as personnel of the West India Company. Risingh met little resistance overtaking the settlement, but was forced to withdraw a year later (Dahlgren and Norman 1988:151–159, 245–277). In 1656, the city of Amsterdam assumed control of the colony from the overextended Dutch West India Company. The settlement, renamed New Amstel, initially thrived and reportedly contained a maximum population of 600 people residing in 110 houses laid out in two rows of long, narrow lots, with 50′ or 60′ frontage, 300′ deep, extending through the block from street to street. By 1659, however, political infighting and economic turmoil had led to emigration, and the population plummeted (Heite 1978:10, 56; Weslager 2001:1, 16). Conflict with Swedish settlers continued through the 1660s, as they challenged Dutch rule (Fur 2006:226–227).

In 1664, the Duke of York captured New Amstel in order to extend English control along the Atlantic coast and thwart the lucrative Dutch trade in tobacco and furs with Maryland planters. The English rebuilt the fort, established a colonial court at the renamed New Castle, resurveyed the streets, granted properties, drained marshes, and built dykes to prevent flooding. This construction effort muted the town’s ­military character, but did not affect its eclectic look and population, composed of Lenape, African servants, and Swedish, Dutch, Finnish, French, and English settlers (Heite 1978). Excavations in New Castle have been limited, and few seventeenth-century contexts discovered. One has proven suggestive. Isaac Tayne, a French-born Dutch citizen, acquired a waterfront property in the early 1660s and lived there with his wife, a New Amstel widow (Heite 1978:114). His new house measured 33′ deep and 26′ wide (10  ×  7.9 m), gable end to the street. Excavations documented his efforts to fill a low-lying swale, and archaeobotanical remains revealed the dominance of native grasses and colonising asters typical of a riverine environment undergoing transformation into an agricultural settlement and a population relying on local deadwood for fuel. Nails and brick remained from the new construction on the lot and possibly from demolition or renovation of an earlier domicile. The remains describe a timber-framed building with brick chimney and hearth, wood roof and siding, and at least one glazed window (De Cunzo in prep.).

Artefact distribution indicates a compact living area along the riverfront. More than 95% of the artefacts came from the yard next to the house, their numbers thinning dramatically behind the house and toward the adjoining property line. They suggest a mixed-use work space and refuse dump. Food waste, although limited, includes head cuts of cow, sheep, and pig such as brawn, jowl, and tongue in addition to rib and leg cuts such as ham and loins. The origin of the deer, goose and other fowl, fish, oysters, and turtle may be suggested by their occurrence with Indian materials. A deer haunch, its long bones shattered to extract marrow, and oysters harvested locally, close to shore, may have traded hands across cultures (De Cunzo in prep.).

Interaction with the Lenape is clearly evident, although its exact nature remains unclear. Recovered Minguannan ceramics may have been traded as a commodity or a container for foodstuffs; the few fragments are inconclusive. They appeared in context with 1,075 lithic flakes and shatter from someone finishing or maintaining jasper biface tools in the yard. Readily available, and commonly used, jasper occurred in deposits west of New Castle, in southeastern Pennsylvania, and northwest Maryland. More enigmatic is the single glass trade bead embedded in the buried seventeenth-century living surface behind the house (Fig. 11.6). Dutch and English smoking pipes are more numerous, although Tayne’s tobacco suppliers remain unknown. We do know the exchanges occurred when authorities feared the outbreak of war with the native people fuelled by excessive use of European spirits (De Cunzo in prep.).

Fig. 11.6

Artefacts, Isaac Tayne household, 1660s. (a) Lithic debitage. (b) German grey ­stoneware jug. (c) Ball clay tobacco pipes. (d) Tin-enamelled blue-on-white earthenware plate featuring mermaid design. (e) Fragments, tin-enamelled earthenware costrel. Site 7NC-E-105C, Read House and Gardens, New Castle, Delaware. Collections of Delaware Historical Society. (Photo by the author)

The Taynes also discarded at least 13 ceramic food and beverage storage, preparation, service, and consumption vessels. The diversity, distinctiveness, and international origins of this small assemblage are striking. Storage vessels include an Iberian jar, redware pot, buff-bodied pot or jar, two German grey stoneware jugs, and a probable Hohr stoneware jug. An exceptionally unusual, and possibly unique, vessel reported in colonial Delaware to date is a double-handled costrel. It matches descriptions of fine-grained Mexican majolica, although this attribution is not definitive. Tin-glazed tablewares and display pieces included a blue-on-white ­mermaid plate and a blue-on-white floral charger. A probable vetro a fili beaker would have brought further distinction to the Taynes’ dining table in this era of political, social, and economic manoeuvring for position and opportunity (De Cunzo in prep.).

Between 1651 and 1680, many objects changed hands at Fort Casimir, Fort Trefaldighet, New Amstel, and New Castle in the name of diplomacy, empire, and trade, most arriving on Dutch ships or along Indian pathways. In this case, we know the French and Dutch ancestry of the Taynes, but could not have discerned their specific European origins or identities from the material remains. How can we distinguish a Swede from a Dutchman from an Englishman, the period of Swedish imperial control from that of the Dutch or the English? In Sweden, imperialism was multicultural acquisitiveness like and yet not like it was throughout Europe. The familiarity and the exoticism of that material world to colonial scholars give us pause as we wonder, and ponder, how to unravel this complexity. We have much to learn from the European borderland. The Swedish royalty and nobility appropriated the refined and civilised, and hybridised the conquered in a process of mimicry that relocated and recreated—almost—the European centre. Then, entering the nationalist imperialist contest late and unprepared, they turned to complication, negotiation, obfuscation, and ambiguity, a risky business that forced the middle ground for a short time.

Nationalist identity and imperial power drove individuals like Governor Risingh and became instruments of personal desire and aspiration for others like Peter Minuit. For both, and for all the others caught in this web of colonialism, fluid identities sustained relationships that supplied coveted things. The intention was for these coveted, exotic things to redefine the materiality of nationalist identity. That is the legacy of New Sweden that pervaded the culture of this Middle Atlantic borderland. Consider one English immigrant, Ralph Hutchinson, who wrote his will in New Castle in 1680 (CSP 1904:395–397). Hendrik Vanden Burgh and John Kan were his appraisers. In his will, Hutchinson distributes his estate as follows: to Pieter Alrichs my Plush Saddle; Wessel Alrichs the mare at John Cokses; two colts of that mare to John Ogle’s sons; to James Walliam and Thomas Woollaston—5 pounds of the best pay of the River; Woollaston also was to receive tools at John Gerretsens; and his wife, the sows at John Smiths; to John Darby the mare running on the island; to Mr. Sempil’s daughter the money due from John Anderson of Christina; to Anne Wollaston the money due from Swart Jacob; to Amond Bedford six oyled skins; to uncle John Bedford 4,000 lb tobacco; sell my plantation at Christina Creek for my sisters’ use, and land in Mayor Fenwick’s colony for my siblings in old England. The interconnectedness of this Englishman’s life with his English, Swedish, Dutch, and Indian neighbours (at least) and the expansiveness of his material life across northern Delaware, across the Delaware, and across the Atlantic are astonishing. How do we do an archaeology of this borderland? This remains as open and complex a question now as it was in 1995, when Kent Lightfoot and Antoinette Martinez (1995:62) urged archaeologists to imagine borders as “simultaneously structures and processes, things and relationships, histories and events”.