The Collision of Military Cultures in Seventeenth-Century New England

Historians of the American frontier have come to appreciate the relativity of their subject. Gone are the days when scholars portrayed the expansion of the colonial pale as a simple diffusion of European civilization into the vacuum of savage anarchy. Contemporary scholars view the frontier as a permeable barrier between two sophisticated, dynamic societies. In their model, both Indians and Europeans encountered pressure for cultural change, and both peoples underwent the process of interaction, exchange, and adjustment that anthropologists term acculturation.