The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony

by James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz

Book Overview

The utterly absorbing real story of the lives of the Pilgrims, whose desires and foibles may be more recognizable to us than they first appear. Americans have been schooled to believe that their... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385721536
• ISBN13: 9780385721530
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 0.89 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A New Look at the Old Story

Dr. James Deetz presents much newly discovered material on the Pilgrims and their journey to the New World. He spends much time describing and giving details on clothing, house building, the legal system with laws and punishment and generally gives the reader a vision of life in the 1600s. He includes lists of possessions and values of items belonging to several men, giving us a glimpse into the world of their time. Even though his research questions many of our previously held assumptions, he presents a picture of a strong, dedicated group of individuals acting together as a group to meet a common goal.

A unique book on the Plymouth Colony written from an archaeologist point of view

The Time of Their Lives by James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz is about the Pilgrims' culture in Plymouth Colony. The book explores Plymouth Colony through archaeological evidence. The thesis of the book is "Plymouth Colony has an organizing story that is worth recounting in all its colorful detail, enlivened and expanded by contemporary archaeology, cultural research and living history" (xv). This book gives an improved description of who the Pilgrims were. This book clears up the false interpretations of the Pilgrims as being holy and enlightened by examining their behavior. The book tells about the myths of Thanksgiving in the first chapter. The myths are portrayed as inaccurate when looking at the affairs of the Pilgrims with the Indians. The Pilgrims' laws were based off of English law with adjustment to the new world when necessary. There was use of indentured servants. The book also goes into detail about the different laws and crimes committed. Some sexual crimes that have been documented are bestiality, sodomy, adultery, incest, and fornication. Domestic violence also occurred in Plymouth times. The court was also unlikely to grant divorces because of its strong belief on marriage. The book also explains the different housing in Plymouth Colony. The book goes into detail about the importance of archaeologist findings that explain Plymouth Colony. The Time of Their Lives is a well-written book. The Deetzs use a lot of primary sources to provide first hand evidence to bring to life what it may have been like to live in Plymouth Colony. Court documents are used to demonstrate the types of crimes that were committed in Plymouth Colony and the punishments that were used. There are a lot of court documents that dealt with sex crimes like adultery and bestiality. Some other sources the Deetzs also use are artifacts, folklore, ethnic studies, demographics, ethnography, and letters. The Deetzs use secondary sources to add expertise to their research. For example, "Historian David Hackett Fischer emphasizes the number of saltbox houses in the eastern counties of England in the late sixteenth centuries, and suggests that New Englanders simply built houses with which they were familiar" (190). The authors show how primary sources are useful to give a clear picture of Plymouth Colony. The Deetzs' approaches in making their ideas are clear and effective. Occasionally they will propose a question and then answer it at the end of the paragraph. For example, they start a paragraph off asking "What might it really have been like to live in Plymouth close to four hundred years ago," and then they conclude with "It is not possible to know what life was really like but the records that do enable us to obtain a glimpse of what did and could happen" (84). The proposed question causes the reader to think. The book also has a lot of different topics in the chapters, which prevents the book from being repetitive. The Deetzs' a

Shatter the Stereotype

In this interesting book, Deetz and Deetz develop a realistic picture of the original settlers of Plymouth Plantation. Basically, these settlers were not our Thanksgiving stereotype of devout religious dissenters, grim and disciplined, who wore shoes with big square buckles. Instead, these settlers were much more diverse, and were a mixture of religious separatists (the minority) and secular types in search of land and prosperity. Of particular interest to me was the authors' discussion of crime in Plymouth. One warning: The book has passages that suffer from political correctness. This reader found them distracting.

Pilgrims' Progress

_The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony (W. H. Freeman) by James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz, takes the history we would like to believe about the Pilgrims and makes it the history that is history, not wishful thinking. Prepare to abandon cherished ideas: Pilgrims almost undoubtedly never set that first foot on Plymouth Rock. Pilgrims dressed in brightly colored clothes. They didn't live in log cabins. They didn't eat turkey for Thanksgiving. They shot guns off to celebrate that first harvest, but no one is on record of thanking anyone for anything on that day. The most frequent crimes for which they were tried were sexual ones, and premarital sex occurred at a shocking rate. The mythmakers of the nineteenth century found the supposedly pure Pilgrims more attractive than the rowdy, fortune-seeking crew at Jamestown, even though Jamestown preceded Plymouth.The Times of Their Lives deals with the social history of the colony, but also examines how the historians and archeologists have been able to come to present conclusions, some greatly at odds with Pilgrim image. The book climaxes with a description of the changes at Plimoth Plantation, the recreation of the colony along the lines of something like Williamsburg. James Deetz was a director of the museum for eleven years, and took the radical position that visitors should be induced to believe that they had really entered the seventeenth century because nothing would be present that was not there at that time. This lively and fascinating book explains some of how the authenticity was confirmed and instilled in the museum. If we have to abandon some idealization of purity in our puritans, so much the better for a humane understanding of their history.

Times of Their Lives

A thorough, insightful and brilliant analysis.