Guest Speaker: David Givens Director of Archaeology Jamestown Rediscovery

World-renowned as the site of England's first permanent American settlement in 1607, Jamestown was thought to have been lost to erosion until archaeological excavations in 1994 rediscovered the site. Since then, archaeological fieldwork has illuminated not only our understanding of the early years of James Fort but also of entanglement with First Peoples and the forcible arrival of enslaved Angolans in 1619. Located along the north bank of the James River in Virginia, much of Jamestown is low-lying, subject to erosion and flooding, and vulnerable to catastrophic hurricane damage. David Givens will address the climate change challenges that Jamestown faces and will discuss some recent exciting finds. He will also discuss collaborative efforts with Connecticut archaeologists and researchers to protect this critical site and help rewrite American history.

Please join the Archaeological Society of Connecticut and the Friends of the Office of State Archaeology, for a virtual lecture next Wednesday, March 22nd, at 7 pm. Our speaker, Dr. Elizabeth Clay, will be presenting a lecture entitled "Centering Peripheries in the Archaeology of the African Diaspora: Lessons from Habitation La Caroline, French Guiana".

Attendees can register for the talk at the following zoom link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMlcO-qrDMrGtxp2MhjeG3ZeTu4aZFvq-gv

The archaeological investigation of daily life at Habitation La Caroline, a nineteenth-century spice plantation, is the first and only research program in French Guiana to explicitly examine a former village for enslaved laborers in this region of northeastern South America. The material record from this site contributes to the broader comparative study of slavery and post-emancipation in the Americas while offering a distinctive lens through which to explore labor, space, and social identities. This talk presents three overlapping forms of data—archival, material, and ethnographic—to demonstrate the potential of African Diaspora archaeology for reconstructing histories that have been actively obscured through colonial and neocolonial projects. I will furthermore discuss ongoing efforts to build a collaborative and reparative archaeological practice that recognizes the importance of engaging with the past for the benefit of communities in the present.

Elizabeth Clay is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Central Connecticut State Univeristy, where she also directs the Archaeology Lab for African Diaspora Studies. Her research interests include colonial Caribbean plantation societies, race and diaspora, and the cultural heritage of slavery. Most recently, her work has explored the material and social legacies of 19th c. enslavement and abolition in French Guiana, an overseas department of France located in South America

The Archaeological Society of Connecticut’s Winter Virtual Lecture Series

Webinar Registration Address: (copy and paste the link below into your browser)

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYtce2oqzopEt197B_Ap0VeaCnTqQvWiltS

This event begins the  “Unearthing History: The Discovery of a 12,500 year old Paleo-Indian Site along the Farmington River in Avon, CT” webinar series II

Series created by the Avon Historical Society, Avon Free Library & Avon Senior Center

Sponsored by a grant from the Lower Farmington River and Salmon Brook Wild and Scenic Committee with funds from the National Park Service

 Sponsored by a grant from the Lower Farmington River and Salmon Brook Wild
and Scenic Committee with funding from the National Park Service

The partnership of the Avon Historical Society, Avon Free Public Library and Avon Senior Center is pleased to present the first lecture in a second annual five-part webinar series “Unearthing History: The Discovery of a 12,500 year old Paleo-Indian Site along the Farmington River in Avon, CT.”  The first lectured entitled “What Genetics Teaches Us About the Peopling of North America” will be presented by Dr. Jennifer Raff, anthropological geneticist at the University of Kansas.  It will be held on Thursday, March 10 beginning at 7:00pm via Zoom through a link from the Library. It is available free of charge.  Sign up at:  www.avonctlibrary.info

Dr. Raff’s thesis focuses on the question how--and when--did people first come to the American continents? She states, “for many years, scientists thought these questions had a straightforward answer: the first peoples of the Americas journeyed from Siberia across the Bering Land Bridge at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, swiftly dispersing across the continents about 13,000 years ago via an ice-free corridor that opened up as the glacial ice that covered northern North America melted. However, in the last two decades, this model has been shattered by archaeological evidence of people in the Americas thousands of years earlier. As researchers have worked to construct and test new models for the initial peopling of the Americas, they have increasingly incorporated evidence from the genomes of ancient peoples, which provide an archive of human population history. The picture that is slowly emerging is very complicated indeed.

In this talk, we will piece together a story told by fragments of DNA recovered from a tooth in Siberia, from the burials of children in Alaska and Montana, and from adults buried across North, Central, and South America. We’ll try to reconcile this DNA evidence with the stories revealed by a small broken knife found deep below the surface of a muddy pond in Florida and by the footprints of children left thousands of years ago on the banks of an ancient lake in New Mexico. We will explore why the same pieces of evidence tell different stories to different groups of scholars, how they align (or don’t) with the ancient knowledge held by present-day Indigenous descendants, and where the major gaps are currently in our understanding of the earliest peopling of the Americas.”

Dr. Raff studies genomes of contemporary humans and their ancestors for insights into prehistory with a focus on the initial peopling of North America. This presentation is based on her May 2021 Scientific American cover story “Journey into the Americas” and her new book, Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas being released Feb. 2022.  Two copies of her new book will be given away at the end of the talk. 

The “Unearthing History” series II, sponsored by a grant from the Lower Farmington River and Salmon Brook Wild and Scenic Committee, is being held in response to the 2019 excavation of a 12,500-year-old (10,000BC) Paleo-Indian site six feet below ground during a CT Department of Transportation construction project of the now completed bridge on Old Farms and Waterville Roads at Route 10 in Avon, CT.  The survey uncovered more than 15,000 artifacts that are characteristic of the Early and Middle Paleo-Indian periods.  The site is named for Brian D. Jones, the late Connecticut State Archaeologist, who led the effort to dig deep based on earlier excavations in the area over the past few decades. As of this writing, this site is considered the oldest archaeological site of its kind in the Northeast.   

According to Dr. Lucianne Lavin of the Institute for American Indian Studies in Washington, CT, the last Ice Age in this region began to melt away about 17,500BP (Before the Present).  As it receded, a lush new land was exposed that provided for animal life to return about 13,500BP in the form of tundra-grazing animals such as mastodons, mammoths, horses, giant beaver, caribou, and more.  The ancient communities of the Paleo-Indians are thought to have begun to arrive in the northeast after that time in search of those animals for food. They were the first settlers of what is now Connecticut and southern New England.  (Connecticut’s Indigenous Peoples, by Lucianne Lavin, 2013, Yale University Press)

Partners in this series include the Farmington River Watershed Association, Institute of American Indian Studies, Washington, CT and the Avon Land Trust.   The second webinar entitled “Ice Age Animals of New England” will be held on Thursday, April 7 at 7:00pm.  It will be presented by Dr. Sarah Sportman, Connecticut State Archaeologist & Dr. Nathaniel Kitchel, Dept. of Anthropology, Dartmouth.  They will present the Pope Mastodon (found in Farmington on the grounds of Hill-Stead Museum) and the Mount Holly (VT) Mammoth, among other animals of the Ice Age.

To watch the webinars from the 2021 series on YouTube, visit:  www.youtube.com/user/afplct

To register to attend this event, please visit:  www.avonctlibrary.info 

Professor Ernie Wiegand will present a lecture on the archaeology of the indigenous people of Norwalk, Connecticut. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Norwalk Historical Society.

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The John Hollister Site (54-85) is a large 17th-century farm complex located on the fringe of early English settlement on the Connecticut River in present-day South Glastonbury, Connecticut. The farm was occupied from about 1650 to 1711, first by members of the Gilbert family, who were tenant farmers, and later by the Hollisters. The site was identified through oral history and remote sensing work that was carried out in 2015 and 2016.  Excavations at the site were conducted in the summers of 2016-2021 under the direction Connecticut State Archaeologists Brian Jones (2016-2018), Nicholas Bellantoni (2019) and Sarah Sportman (2021), with members of the Friends of the Office of State Archaeology, volunteers, and field school students. The Hollister Site includes at least six buried cellars, two wells, and numerous other subsurface features as well as large, well-preserved assemblages of artifacts and food remains. This presentation will summarize the research conducted at the site to date, including new information from the 2021 field season. 

Dr. Sarah Sportman holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Connecticut (2011). She has worked as an archaeologist for over 20 years, studying the archaeology and history of Euro-American and pre-colonial Indigenous groups in New England and New York. Before accepting the position of Connecticut State Archaeologist in 2020, Dr. Sportman worked as a cultural resource management (CRM) archaeologist for CRM firms in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York, conducting archaeological projects related to construction and development. 

Former State Archaeologist, Dr Nicholas Bellantoni,will talk about his new book exploring archaeology and forensic science in Connecticut’s Mausolea. Books will be available for signing.

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From the mid-18th to mid-19th century, African American communities in New England developed their own political and cultural structure headed by elected officials known as Black Governors or Black Kings. Black Governors/Kings operated at the local level and performed several important social functions including heading events, resolving conflicts, and advocating for the African American community. From 2010 -2018, Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) professors and students, volunteers, and descendants have been excavating the homesite of one, and potentially two, Black Governors: Quosh Freeman and his son Roswell in Osbornedale State Park, Derby, Connecticut to raise awareness of the Black Governors as part of the historic African American presence in the city of Derby. Additionally, the homesite was occupied for 110 years which provides an understanding of the daily life of three generations of the Freemans and their establishment and maintaining of homeplace across a racialized landscape.

Dr. Anthony F. Martin is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Central Connecticut State University.

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In this talk, I review recent work by the Northeastern Archaeological Survey in Downeast Maine. This research project builds on work in the 1950s by Theodore Stoddard and Robert Dyson, who identified a series of sites in the region. Revisiting them has revealed profound damage from coastal erosion. As a result, much of my work Downeast considers excavations at extant sites alongside records and artifacts from earlier sites. I’ll also review some of what this work suggests about life on the Maine coast between about 2200 BP and European contact, and draw some comparisons to the rest of New England.

Gabe Hrynick is an archaeologist specializing in the study of coastal hunter-gatherers, especially their domestic and ritual structures and spaces. Dr. Hrynick's major field program is an ongoing study of coastal sites in Maine and Atlantic Canada, spanning the Terminal Archaic to the Protohistoric period  Dr. Hrynick is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Brunswick.  In addition to his position at UNB, he is also an External Associate at the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute and an elected fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.

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Excavations at the Edgewood Apartments Site (Site 19-NF-792) in Plainville, Massachusetts, recovered evidence for two spatially and temporally separate Gulf of Maine Archaic Tradition (GMAT) occupations during the Early Holocene, as well as a Late Archaic Otter Creek occupation. Lithic artifacts associated with the GMAT occupations include quartz micro-cores and associated flake debitage, while bifacial quartz implements were notably absent.  A large selection of these GMAT tools were subjected to microscopic use-wear analyses, indicating that bipolar reduction was the preferred method of flake (or expedient tool) production at the site, and that a range of faunal and plant remains were processed at both loci. Based on macrobotanical analyses, the GMAT occupations most likely occurred during the late summer or early fall.  A formal reduction sequence for micro-cores at GMAT sites will be presented, to aid in the identification of other GMAT sites throughout the region and to clarify the differences between these sites and more common Late Archaic Narrow-Stem sites and associated reduction sequences.

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Stone and brick tombs were repositories for the physical remains of many of Connecticut’s wealthiest and influential families. The desire to be interred within burial vaults, rather than have their wooden coffins laid into the earth in direct contact with crushing soil burden, led many prominent families to construct large above-ground and semi-subterranean tombs, usually burrowed into the sides of hills as places of interment for their dead.

This presentation is based on the new book And So The Tomb Remains… telling of the former state archaeologist’s investigations into five 18/19th century sepulchers while delving into family histories and genealogies, as well as archaeological and forensic sciences that helped identify the entombed.

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Calluna Hill (Site 59-73) is a small Pequot village attacked and burned by the English during their retreat following the attack on the Pequot fortified village at Mistick on May 26, 1637.  Excavations and metal detecting over the last few years have identified seven distinct domestic areas with associated household middens.  Differences in artifact assemblages and food remains indicate a high degree of intra-site variability with respect to domestic production, activities and food consumption which may reflect status differences. This presentation will discuss recent research at Calluna Hill within the broader context of Pequot settlement patterns and evolving social and political complexity in the early seventeenth century.

NCC Virtual Meeting
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We are pleased to welcome back David Robinson, now the State Underwater Archaeologist for Massachusetts. David will speak to us on the topic of Climate Change, Sea Level Rise and Its Impact on Coastal Archaeological Sites. David graduated from URI in 1990 with a dual degree in art and anthropology and then got his master’s degree in anthropology specializing in shipwreck archaeology—from Texas A&M University. From there, he found work as an underwater archaeologist working for museums and cultural management firms in Vermont, Maryland and, finally, back home in Rhode Island. Over the course of his 29-year career,

David has specialized in multi-disciplinary marine archaeological investigations of submerged shipwrecks, coastal infrastructure, and ancient cultural sites submerged by sea level rise. He has worked extensively with federal and state agencies, Tribes, industry, museums, and academic institutions in the U.S. and abroad. Please join us on May 13 at 7:30 pm for a virtual lecture. The link to enter into your web browser is https:// meet.google.com/jxeeckq-oqs Ap

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European colonization of southern New England in the 17th century AD is known to have profoundly altered the environment of the region. Yet many questions remain about the impacts that European settlers had on the ecology of New England, and old answers to these questions are currently being revisited. Was southern New England an anthropogenic landscape, modified by Native peoples in the millennia prior to European colonization? What exactly happened to the forests, fields, and animals of the region in the years following European arrival? In this talk, I will outline ethnohistorical and archaeological evidence capable of answering these questions. The presently-available data suggest that 17th century southern New England witnessed a dramatic shift from sustainable environmental management and resource use by Native peoples to the unsustainable extraction of resources by Euro-American colonists. I will discuss the implications of these results for the history, archaeology, and ecology of colonial New England, but also for our broader understanding of sustainable environmental policy today.

NCC Virtual Club Meeting
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Tens of thousands of stone monuments are scattered throughout the woodlands and fields of the eastern seaboard of the United States and Canada. These stone constructions have been the subject of debate among archaeologists and antiquarians for the past 75 years. Were these structures built by colonial farmers removing rocks from their fields; pre-Columbian transatlantic voyagers; or as sacred places by the indigenous peoples of the region? Or are they a result of natural deposition by glaciers or downslope erosion? The hypothesis that many of these structures were sacred places of indigenous people has gained significant attention over the past decade, as the regional descendant indigenous communities have offered strong, vocal support to preserve these monuments from encroachment and desecration by development interests. Please join us April 15th at 7:30 pm for a virtual lecture. The meeting link to enter into your web browser is https://meet.google.com/yzr-tvgc-xxm

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Templeton was first excavated in the late 1970s and early 1980s by Dr. Roger Moeller. Since 2016, renewed excavations at Templeton have investigated site formation processes and Paleoindian spatial patterning at the site. In this presentation, we report the results of the ongoing fieldwork at Templeton including the discovery of new Paleoindian activity areas, new radiocarbon dates, and recent geological investigations into the deep burial of the Paleoindian component.

Zachary Singer received his Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut in 2017. Zac is the Research Archaeologist for the Maryland Historical Trust. His research interests include eastern North American archaeology, Paleoindian lithic technology, three-dimensional digital modeling of artifacts, and geophysical remote sensing.

After this presentation, FOSA will hold its virtual Annual Meeting

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The story of maize, squash, and bean in the Eastern Woodlands and the role of these cultigens in New England societies have been hotly debated topics in local archaeology. This talk will present results from a phytolith and accelerator mass spectrometer dating analysis of carbonized food residues and sediment soils from sites in southern New England (Connecticut and Rhode Island) dating 2500–500 BP. Phytolith analyses of carbonized food residues from sites across northeastern North America outside of southern New England demonstrate that maize (Zea mays L.) was introduced to the region as early as 2300 BP, hundreds of years before major shifts in settlement strategies became widespread. Phytolith evidence for maize in eastern North America likewise appears hundreds of years earlier than most maize macroremains, such as kernels, cobs, and cupules, appear. This has puzzled researchers attempting to piece together how maize was first circulated and used in the Eastern Woodlands. Phytolith analysis of 135 samples of carbonized food residues from thirteen sites from Connecticut and Rhode Island indicates that, consistent with research outside the study area, at least some groups in southern New England cooked maize as early as 2300 BP, that squash was relatively widespread, and found no phytolith evidence for common bean. The results also indicate that maize cooking practices varied in ways that likely reflect both seasonality and broader subsistence strategies and that may explain the temporal gap between maize phytoliths and maize macroremains. This research also demonstrates that plant microfossil analysis is best paired with good macrobotanical analysis and that future phytolith work in this area should focus on sampling feature and site sediments for improving our understanding of plant-use and plant processing.

Krista Dotzel is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Connecticut. She has 14 years of archaeological field experience and has worked at sites in Germany, France, Syria, Armenia, Iowa, Illinois, and New England. She received her BA from the University of Iowa and an MA from Tübingen University, Germany, where she studied Upper Palaeolithic bone tools. Her current research interests focus on people-plant interactions, particularly in plant cooking and processing strategies, in southern New England.

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Evidence from recent excavations of a shell midden near the Housatonic River estuary in Milford, Connecticut supports the inclusion of Narrow Stemmed Tradition points in Early, Middle, and Late Woodland Period toolkits. Comparative analysis with sites in the Housatonic and Connecticut River valleys, Narragansett Bay, and Cape Cod suggest that the continued use of Narrow Stemmed points from Late Archaic times may have been related to decreases in the size of group territories and the ubiquity of quartz cobbles as a source of raw material.

Daniel Zoto received a Bachelor’s Degree in Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Master’s Degree in Anthropology from the University of Connecticut. Dan works as a Principal Investigator-Archaeology at Gray and Pape, Inc. in Providence, Rhode Island. He has worked as an archaeologist in cultural resource management for the last ten years and has done extensive public outreach with the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History. Dan’s research interests include the archaeology of New England, stone tool technology, lithic sourcing, coastal archaeology, and cultural resource management.

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This presentation will explore three seventeenth century Pequot domestic sites found through a combined use of metal detecting and traditional archaeological survey techniques. These sites, along with two others nearby, represent the “largest assemblage of early seventeenth century indigenous sites associated with a single Native group ever identified in southern New England” (McBride et al. 2016:20) and are dated, based upon their material signature, to between 1611 (the arrival of the Dutch) and 1637 (the conclusion of the Pequot War of 1636-1637). This presentation will discuss the diagnostic artifacts recovered from each site and the spatial organization of these artifacts. This research has implications for better understanding early 17th century indigenous settlement patterns and early trade interactions in southern New England.   

Megan Willison is a doctoral candidate at the University of Connecticut and an archaeologist with the National Park Service at Dinosaur National Monument. She is currently writing her dissertation, which has been aided through funds from FOSA.