A Deep Presence

We are proud to announce that A Deep Presence: 13,000 Years of Native American History has been awarded:

★2022 Benjamin Franklin Award, Silver Medal for Multicultural

★2023 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist. Regional Non-Fiction.

Almost 13,000 years ago, small groups of Paleoindians endured frigid winters on the edge of a river in what would become Keene, New Hampshire.

This begins the remarkable story of Native Americans in the Monadnock region of southwestern New Hampshire, part of the traditional homeland of the Abenaki people.

Typically neglected or denied by conventional history, the long presence of Native people in southwestern New Hampshire is revealed by archaeological evidence for their deep, enduring connections to the land and the complex social worlds they inhabited.

From the Tenant Swamp Site in Keene, with the remains of the oldest known dwellings in New England, to the 4,000-year-old Swanzey Fish Dam still visible in the Ashuelot River, A Deep Presence tells their story in a narrative fashion, drawing on the author's thirty years of fieldwork and presenting compelling evidence from archaeology, written history, and the living traditions of today's Abenaki people.

For many people, home is not one spot on the landscape, it can be many places. In A Deep Presence: 13,000 Years of Native American History, archaeologist Robert Goodby writes a compelling story of the archaeological discoveries that help fill in some of the mysteries of Native American life and movement across the Monadnock region of New Hampshire over millennia. Based on 30 years of fieldwork, Goodby describes with great detail the tools, pottery, stonework, and other records revealed at archaeological sites along rivers and wetlands, in forests and fields. Each site has yielded insights into past inhabitants’ life in this region, along with hints at the vast social networks that existed before European settlement. Goodby goes beyond archaeology, seeking answers from Native scholars, storytellers, and others to learn about the past and from contemporary practices, including recent efforts to revitalize and share Abenaki culture.—Northern Woodland Magazine 2022

Robert Goodby is Professor of Anthropology at Franklin Pierce University. He earned his PhD in anthropology from Brown University and has over thirty years of experience excavating Native American archaeological sites in New England. He is a past president of the New Hampshire Archeological Society, a former Trustee of the Mt. Kearsarge Indian Museum, and served on the New Hampshire Commission on Native American Affairs. He has directed over three hundred archaeological studies authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act and his work has appeared in anthropological journals and in anthologies published by the Smithsonian Institution Press and University Press of New England. He has presented more than one hundred talks on his archaeological research for the New Hampshire “Humanities to Go” program, and every fall speaks to students at the Keene Middle School about the Paleoindian Tenant Swamp Site. Visit his website at monadarch.com.