ABSTRACT
Margaret M. Bruchac work as a traditional Abenaki storyteller often dovetails with my efforts as an Indigenous archaeologist. She explores and interprets physical and ephemeral locales where memories reside, where Indigenous knowledges are situated, and where histories of past events speak in some way to the present. She came from a place called Splinterville Hill, in the town of Greenfield, in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, northwest of the tourist resort of Saratoga Springs, near Fox Hill and Indian Hollow, and not far from Barktown and Indian Stream. Her desire to understand the social mechanisms that shaped the survival of regional life-ways and traditions, especially in transcultural rural locales, eventually turned me toward anthropology. The practices of storytelling and archaeology, as she noted at the outset, sometimes dovetail in unexpected places. In 1996, although skeptical of archaeology, she began serving as a consultant for the University of Massachusetts-Amherst field school at Pine Hill in Deerfield, sharing traditional stories.
