Editing Falmouth, Maine (section)

=== Native Americans ===

Native Americans followed receding glaciers into Maine around 11,000 [[Common Era|BCE]]. At the time of European contact in the sixteenth century, people speaking a western dialect of the [[Abenaki|Wabanaki]] language inhabited present-day Falmouth. Captain [[John Smith (explorer)|John Smith]] observed a semi-autonomous [[Band society|band]]  known as the Aucocisco living in [[Casco Bay]]. English explorer [[Christopher Levett]] met with the Aucocisco [[Sachem|Sagamore]] Skittery Gusset at his summer village at the [[Presumpscot River|Presumpscot Falls]] in 1623.

A combination of warfare and disease decimated Native peoples in the years before English colonization, creating a shatter zone of devastation and political instability in what would become southern Maine. The introduction of European wares in the 1500s reoriented long-standing Native trade relationships in the [[Gulf of Maine]]. Warfare soon broke out among groups such as the [[Mi'kmaq]] and [[Penobscot]] who sought to subjugate their neighbors by monopolizing access to European goods. The arrival of foreign pathogens only served to compound the upheaval in the region. A particularly notorious epidemic between 1614 and 1620 ravaged the population of coastal [[New England]] with mortality rates at upwards of 90 percent. Native peoples were not totally destroyed however, maintaining a visible presence in the Casco Bay area until [[King George's War]] in the 1740s. French military defeats and increasing settler migration to the area from the southern [[New England Colonies]] impelled most Native Americans to assimilate into British colonial society, migrate toward the protection of [[French Canada|New France]] or further up the coast where they remain today.<ref>Bruce J. Borque, Twelve Thousand Years: American Indians in Maine (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 16; Emerson W. Baker, “Finding the Almouchiquois: Native American Families, Territories, and Land Sales in Southern Maine,” Ethnohistory 51, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 73-100; Christopher Levett, A Voyage into New England: Begun in 1623, and Ended in 1624 (London: 1628); David L. Ghere, "The 'Disappearance of the Abenaki in Western Maine: Political Organization and Ethnocentric Assumptions," American Indian Quarterly 17, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 193–207.</ref>