Creating New England, Defending the Northeast : Contested Algonquian and English Spatial Worlds, 1500-1700

Examining maps and placemaking during negotiations between Indigenous people and colonial settlers Between 1500 and 1700, Indigenous and English mapmakers across the North Atlantic depicted present-day New England in markedly distinct ways, highlighting how differently their communities understood the landscape.While English cartographers relied on new mathematics and other developing scientific knowledge from Europe, as well as an overhead perspective of the world, Algonquian mapmakers drew on deep knowledge of the landscape, derived from their communities' long history upon it.Nathan Braccio refers to this phenomenon as 'parallel landscapes.' Creating New England, Defending the Northeast asserts that Algonquian knowledge of the landscape represented a powerful and persistent alternative to English surveying and mapmaking in the Northeast.When English colonists and explorers recognized the unsuitability of their techniques for understanding New England’ s unfamiliar landscape, they at