Native American Archaeology

Native Americans have been present in New York for 13,000 years. Since the mid-19th century, the New York State Museum has conducted archaeological investigations that have helped to write the histories of Native Americans in the state. The Museum continues that tradition today through field- and collections-based research. Current research is aimed at increasing our understandings of the earliest Native American occupants of New York, between 13,000 and 10,000 years ago; the histories of various agricultural crops and the evolution of agricultural systems some 3,000 to 500 years ago; the ways in which Native American groups settled the landscape and how settlements changed through time 3,000 to 500 years ago; and the ways in which different Native American groups interacted with one another through trade, exchange, and symbolism.

Dr. Jonathan Lothrop

Curator of Archaeology
jonathan.lothrop@nysed.gov

My research is focused on how and when Indigenous peoples migrated into what we now call New York during the Late Pleistocene or Ice Age and the Early Holocene, between 13,000 and 10,000 years ago, and how they survived initially on the region's subarctic landscapes.

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My Research Project

The New York Paleoindian Database Project (NYPID)

Late Pleistocene Lifeways

Dr. Christina Rieth

State Archaeologist and Co-Director, Cultural Resource Survey Program
christina.rieth@nysed.gov

My research focuses on the ways that prehistoric groups interacted with their local environment and the role that such interaction had on the settlement and subsistence strategies of New York’s Late Prehistoric (A.D. 700-1450) occupants.