Skip to content

Indigenous History of Essex County, Massachusetts

From the Last Ice Age to 1700

Menu
  • HOME
  • ABOUT
  • CONTENTS
Menu

ABOUT: Mary Ellen Lepionka

Lepionka PictureMary Ellen Lepionka of Gloucester is an independent scholar researching the Indigenous history of Essex County from the last Ice Age to around 1700 for a book on the subject. Some chapters have been published on capeannhistory.org. Mary Ellen is a retired college instructor, textbook developer, author, and publisher with a Master’s degree in anthropology from Boston University and post-graduate work at the University of British Columbia. She taught cultural and physical anthropology and world history at Boston University, Vancouver City College, Northeastern University, North Shore Community College, and Salem State College. She participated in salvage archaeology on Great Neck in Ipswich, excavated an Early Iron Age Bantu refuge site in Botswana, and conducted fieldwork in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Mary Ellen also had a career in higher education publishing as a developmental editor of college textbooks. Her book, Writing and Developing Your College Textbook, has been published in a third edition and as an online course by the Text and Academic Authors Association. Articles by Mary Ellen on local Indigenous history appear in the Bulletin of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society, the Journal of the New England Antiquities Research Association, Northeast Anthropology, historicipswich.org, enduringgloucester.com, and capeannslavery.org. Some of her slide lectures on Indigenous peoples of Essex County, Massachusetts, have been posted on YouTube. 

 

Chapter Questions

  • How Do We Know Indigenous People Lived Here?
  • What do our Algonquian place names really mean?
  • Why did we know so little about Indigenous history here?
  • What people lived in Essex County, and when?
  • Who were the Paleoindians?
  • Who were the Maritime Archaics?
  • Who were the people of the Eastern Woodlands?
  • How did the Eastern Algonquians make their living in Essex County?
  • Who were the Pawtucket and where did they come from?
  • Where were the Indigenous settlements in Essex County?
  • What did Champlain see in the “Cape of Islands”?
  • Who Else Explored Here and What Did They Find?
  • How Were the Pawtucket Organized and Led?
  • How Did the Pawtucket Make Sense of Their World?

www.capeannhistory.org

Copyright 2017-2022 Mary Ellen Lepionka.

Most rights reserved.

© 2023 Indigenous History of Essex County, Massachusetts | Powered by Superbs Personal Blog theme