Abstract
In 1637 the Swedish Crown, encouraged by Dutch merchants, developed a plan to establish a colonial outpost in America to tap into profitable tobacco and beaver pelt trade. The same year the first cargo ships left Sweden and sailed westwards to claim their piece of America along the Delaware River. Although in many ways unsuccessful and short-lived (the colony collapsed in 1656), New Sweden became a home for generations of colonists. This chapter focuses on the different aspects of their daily life: their longing and desperation, practices of homemaking and domesticating the landscape and their perception and interactions with the neighbouring Native American groups. It discusses the ways material culture was used, exchanged and appropriated by the colonists and the local Lenape and Susquehannock in the processes of meeting, negotiations and daily coexistence.
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Notes
- 1.
This decision was not taken lightly by Governor Printz. He deserted once before from a battle fi eld in Germany—a decision that resulted in imprisonment and a setback in his carrier (Johnson 1930 ) .
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Acknowledgements
This chapter summarises some of the results of an ongoing research project on the colony of New Sweden. We thank the Crafoord Foundation, Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and the Department of Archaeology, Lund University for the financial support of the project.
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Ekengren, F., Naum, M., Wolfe, U.I.ZM. (2013). Sweden in the Delaware Valley: Everyday Life and Material Culture in New Sweden. In: Naum, M., Nordin, J. (eds) Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology, vol 37. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6202-6_10
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