NO ONE IS HELPING ME PLEASE IM FINNA CRY I SWEAR I BEGGING YOU PLZ NO COPY AND PASTEING PLEASE We don’t know how the bone of a cow, a European domesticated animal, wound up mingled with other more traditional Munsee household refuse here [Clason’s Point, the Bronx] and at other sites in the city. The meat could have been given, bought, or stolen, or the livestock could have been raised by the community. Written accounts suggest all of these possibilities.

No matter how the meat got here, this seemingly insignificant find underscores the profound and irrevocable economic and ecological changes taking place not only here but throughout seventeenth-century coastal New York. As the colonial settlements grew, Dutch and English farms began expanding more and more into Munsee territory. The colonists cut down forests for lumber, cleared fields, planted European crops, and grazed European animals. These practices radically altered local ecosystems and destroyed the habitats of many of the animals that the Munsees had traditionally hunted and the plants on which they had depended.

Compounding these changes was the tense political climate in the mid-seventeenth century. Not only did the wars take energies away from economic activities, but Munsee and Dutch also destroyed each others’ crops as part of conflicts. As a result, the Munsees had to find new strategies to get food and to deal with their rapidly changing natural world, which they were now sharing with the colonists. This piece of cow bone, then, is evidence of the dramatic changes in the economy and landscape that were taking place throughout the world.

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