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Prior to European colonization, the region around modern-day Boston was inhabited by the indigenous Massachusett. Their habitation consisted of small, seasonal communities. The people who lived in the area most likely moved between inland winter homes along the Charles River (called Quinobequin, meaning “meandering”, by the Native people) and summer communities on the coast. Game was more easily hunted inland during bare-tree seasons and fishing shoals and shellfish beds were most easily exploited during the summer months.

Being surrounded by foul-smelling mudflats during the temperate part of the year, the Shawmut Peninsula itself was more sparsely occupied than its surroundings before the arrival of Europeans. Nevertheless, archaeological excavations have revealed one of the oldest fishweirs in New England on Boylston Street. Native people constructed this weir to trap fish as early as 7,000 years before European arrival in the Western Hemisphere.

The first European to live in what would become Boston was a Cambridge-educated Anglican cleric named William Blaxton. He was the person most directly responsible for the foundation of Boston by Puritan colonists in 1630. This occurred after Blaxton invited one of their leaders, Isaac Johnson to cross Back Bay from the failing colony of Charlestown and share the peninsula. This the Puritans did in September 1630.