The paper which follows was written by me in 1965. It was originally intended to serve as an in-house guide for Plantation staff to use when explaining Wampanoag culture to visitors. The absence of any other comprehensive treatment of Plymouth’s aboriginal population has made the paper an item much in demand by Plantation staff, visitors, and members of the academic community. Hopefully its publication in the OCCASIONAL PAPERS series will make this ethnographic information available to an even greater number of interested persons. CM FOREWORD by Dr. Alex F. Ricciardelli, Director of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brown University. This monograph represents the only extensive ethnography we have of the Wampanoag Indians and provides us with the best understanding available of Massasoit and his people at the time they occupied the coastal areas of southern New England. The author has consulted all the known historical sources and arranged the material into a series of topical categories which will serve as a handy reference to the literature. Useful also are the author’s comments regarding those parts of Wampanoag culture about which we presently have no knowledge. Southern New England has been one of the neglected areas in the anthropology of North America. This seems strange when one considers that the oldest museums and departments of anthropology in the United States are located here. The usual explanation seems satisfactory enough at first glance: there has been no extensive record of anthropology in southern New England because there are no subjects for study. The indigenous people were among the first to experience the ravages of contact with European colonists. Disease, war, and forced migrations throughout the 17th and 18th centuries effectively depopulated the area of most of its original inhabitants. Those few who remained were supposedly detribalized and merged with the Europeans. Even their artifacts were carted off across the ocean to be placed in cabinets of curiosities. To this day some of the best and largest ethnographic collections of New England Indian material culture are found in European museums and private estates. Further, Colonial towns were located on prehistoric and early historic Indian camps and villages, and in other ways the growing industrial complex of the Northeast covered over or erased the Indian sites. As a result, at the end of the 19th century, when anthropology as a formal discipline emerged, the native peoples and most of the material vestiges of their presence were gone.