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Landscapes have long been a focus of archaeological study, with particular attention paid to how they serve to shape the relationship between structures and features across space. More recently, archaeologists have begun to consider the experiential dimension of the landscape and how the senses serve to mediate how people make sense of space and place. Through careful analysis of the multisensory landscape of the mid-19th-century Connecticut River valley and the sensory world of the blind and Black abolitionist, journalist, and doctor David Ruggles, the process whereby people come to be connected to historical processes materially and sensually is revealed. This analysis illustrates how abolition, industrialization, and racialization were experienced through the senses and how they impacted Ruggles’s experience of the landscape.

The recent history of western Massachusetts was shaped by a set of processes familiar in post-Columbian North America, including colonization, revolutionary repositioning in the Atlantic and world system, industrialization and deindustrialization, struggles for racial emancipation and gender and sexual equality, and the emergence of cultural reproduction to supplement, and increasingly to replace, the loss of industrial work. The particular political, economic, social, ideological, and ecological contexts of western Massachusetts are presented to provide background for the finer-grained studies in the articles that follow.