Ordering Information
$28.00, 7 x 10, paperback, 160 pages ISBN: 978-1-942155-40-9
To order copies online visit The Historical Society of Cheshire County’s website. The museum shop is located at 246 Main Street Keene, NH 03431. Phone: (603) 352-1895
For wholesale orders – contact Pathway Book Service.
2022 Silver Benjamin Franklin Award from IBPA for Multicultural
2023 Finalist, Regional Nonfiction Next Generation Indie Book Awards
2023 People’s Choice Winner, Nonfiction – NH Literary Awards
A Deep Presence: 13,000 Years of Native American History
by Robert Goodby
About the Book
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.
About the Author
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 “Humanities to Go” program, and every fall speaks to students at the Keene Middle School about the Paleoindian Tenant Swamp Site.
