Bergen was a part of the 17th-century Dutch colony of New Netherland, in what is now northeastern New Jersey. Placenames in most cases had their roots in Algonquian Lenape and Dutch. At the time of European settlement, the area was largely the territory of the Acquackanonk Raritan, Tappan, and Hackensack Native American tribes. The Munsee lived in the colony's northwestern reaches, the Highlands, while the Wappinger lived to the northeast in the Hudson Valley. The definition of these groups as they are known today is often from the perception of the colonizing Dutch, who tended to call the existing people by the name of a location within their territory, thus creating an exonym. Both the Lenape and Dutch often named a place based on the geography or geology of the natural environment and d