The Ecology of Land Deeds in the Colonial Mid-Atlantic

About this event

Through confusion and coercion, land deeds became a devastating technology of colonial encroachment onto Native land in colonial North America. Yet they are also a record of the plants, animals, and environmental features central to both Native and settler placemaking. Using seventeenth-century New Jersey as a case-study, this paper focuses on the hodgepodge geography of markers and boundaries reflected in land deeds, forged in hyperlocal contexts as Dutch, English, and Lenape inhabitants negotiated and physically traversed the boundaries of settlement. Understanding the social, epistemological, and environmental contexts of land negotiation helps illuminate territorial occupation, disputes, and sovereignty in colonial North America.

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