Visualizing the Lenape Habitation Sites
“The Lenapes comprised a dozen-odd groups living between eastern Connecticut and central New Jersey. New York City had as many as fifteen thousand inhabitants — estimates vary widely — with perhaps another thirty to fifty thousand in the adjacent parts of New Jersey, Connecticut, Westchester County, and Long Island.”
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“Within the five boroughs of modern New York alone, archaeologists have identified about eighty Lenape habitation sites, more than two dozen planting fields, and the intricate network of paths and trails that laced them all together.”
“On Manhattan, the primary trail ran along the island’s hilly spine from what is now Battery Park in the south to Inwood in the north. Just north of City Hall Park it passed by an encampment near a sixty-foot-deep pond, fed by an underground spring, which together with adjacent meadow and marsh lands almost bisected the island. Farther north, where the trail passed Greenwich Village, a secondary path led west to Sapokanikan, a site of fishing and planting on the Hudson River near the foot of Gansevoort Street.”
“At about 98th Street and Park Avenue the trail ran by a campsite known as Konaande Kongh and, on the broad flats of Harlem just to the north, still more fishing camps and planting fields. (From an East River landing at about 119th Street, fishermen paddled out in tree-trunk canoes to net or spear striped bass.)”
“Its northern terminus was a cluster of three camps along the Harlem River, two of which now actually lie on the mainland, severed from Manhattan by the Harlem Ship Canal.”
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Sources
Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace (1999). Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. Oxford University Press.
Dr. Eric Sanderson (2007). Mannahatta 1609. Wildlife Conservation Society, The Welikia Project.
Matt Fox (2010). Clean Earth. Google Earth Library.
