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Illustration by Miranda Nelken of Paleoindian
tent; from sign at Keene Middle School.
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While walking down the broad, tree-lined Main Street of Keene, New Hampshire, across from Keene State College, one can easily miss the small boulder with the tarnished metal plaque. Erected in the 1930s by the Daughters of the American Revolution, it proclaims “This Boulder Marks the Spot of the Old Fort Built in 1738 by the Early Settlers of Upper Ashuelot as a Refuge From the Indians,” providing one of the only visible hints that the Monadnock region of southwestern New Hampshire has a history beyond that of its first English speaking settlers. Like much of the United States, the dominant white culture has an uncomfortable relationship with Native American history, stumbling over the ugly facts of conquest and extermination that were prerequisites for the creation of modern America. The history of the Monadnock region in the mid-18th century was indeed bloody, with most towns being abandoned shortly after their founding. The indigenous Abenaki, allied with the French to the north, were fighting to prevent expansion of English settlement. Yet, despite the centrality of the Abenaki to this period, Griffin’s History of Keene proclaims “The country was a wilderness…for many years but few Indians had lived in this immediate vicinity,” denying Native people their tenure as the original occupants of this region. This marginalization of Native history is also reflected by my college students who typically identify 1620 as the date the first human beings arrived in New England, somehow forgetting the hosts of the first Thanksgiving they so dutifully learned about in elementary school.
How long have Indian people lived in the Monadnock region? Evidence comes from an archaeological study required by the environmental review for a new regional middle school in Keene. The old middle school, located in a woefully antiquated building in the heart of downtown Keene, struggled to serve students from the city and surrounding towns due to lack of adequate athletic fields, parking, or the modern infrastructure of 21st century education. The local school district, SAU 29, formed a building committee and issued bonds for 38 million dollars, with the aim of opening a new school in September of 2010 on a site outside of the downtown area.
The location for the new school was a level outwash plain adjacent to Tenant Swamp, a large wetland northwest of Keene center. The proximity to this wetland meant the project would require a permit, issued by the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services on behalf of the US Army Corps of Engineers. The Army Corps’ involvement made it a federal undertaking, triggering an archaeological review under the National Historic Preservation Act, the sort of regulatory entanglement that so often angers developers and advocates of deregulation. While this type of review process brings about hundreds of archaeological studies each year in New Hampshire alone, most of these are completed quickly and inexpensively with a finding that no important resources are present. But the Keene Middle School project would be different.
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Paleoindian Scraping Tools, Tenant Swamp Site. |
Archaeological fieldwork at the school site began in the fall of 2009, with the excavation of ninety-two 50 cm x 50 cm test pits placed on an eight-meter interval grid across the outwash terrace north of Tenant Swamp. Four of these test pits produced artifacts, limited to small, thin sharp-edge chips or flakes of fine grained stone, the by-product of stone tool making. The stone itself, rhyolites from northern New Hampshire and chert from the Munsungun Lakes region of north-central Maine, suggested the site’s antiquity, as the use of these materials is strongly associated with sites of the Paleoindian period, between 10,000 and 13,000 years before present. Additional excavation in early December recovered more flakes, four stone tools and fragments of burned bone, arranged in two distinct clusters suggestive of separate campsites or activity areas. Because of its great age and the lack of disturbance, the site was eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, requiring a final phase of work before construction could take place. This listing posed a potential threat to the construction schedule, and the news provoked stunned silence among the building committee when it was delivered at a meeting in December of 2009. The silence was broken by then-Superintendent Bill Gurney, who sighed, and said “well…I see some potential for our kids in this.”
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Paleoindian House #2 Site during Excavation. |
The final stage of excavation revealed one of the most significant Native American sites ever excavated in New Hampshire. Over two hundred stone tools, over 4,700 stone flakes, and 105 fragments of burned animal bone were recovered in four well-defined oval clusters, marking the interior of hide-covered tents occupied by small family groups at the end of the Pleistocene. The arrangement of artifacts within these ovals suggested household organization, with the burned bones, tightly concentrated in the center of the oval, marking the location of small fires. Individual bone fragments were identified as caribou and otter, reflecting the hunting economy of these early people. Stones from distant quarry sources in northern New England, some as far away as 350 miles, showed the Paleoindians were not primitive and isolated, but part of a complex, far-flung network of related people that extended across New England and northeastern North America. Burned bone from the center of one of the tent floors was radiocarbon dated to 12,600 years before present, making it one of the oldest dated archaeological sites in New England, and placing the occupation at the start of the Younger Dryas climatic reversal, a period of bitter cold, wet, and unstable climate that would last for almost a thousand years.
Microscopic wear on stone tools showed the site’s residents spent much of their time working animal hides and making tools. Two even had traces of prehension, created when the tool is held in the hand so tightly and for so long that it leaves a distinctive polish. These artifacts, together with an almost-total lack of evidence for hunting, suggest winter occupation, when deep snows and windy, frigid conditions would make hunting next to impossible. Instead, the Paleoindian people, drawing on food stocks set by in warmer months, would have waited out the long winter in the close confines of their tents, making and repairing tools, and telling the stories that passed on their wisdom and traditions. By employing insights from anthropology and basic human empathy, it is not difficult to travel back in time more than 12,000 years and imagine what it was like in those dark, smoky tents - the struggle to keep children amused, the concern for an elder whose cough was not getting better, the anticipation of seeing extended family in the spring when the snows melted and people could travel again. The excavation of the site on Tenant Swamp bridges the divide between the present and the distant past, and offers the people of the Monadnock region a more complete story of the place they know as home.
Despite the extensive archaeological study, the new Keene Middle School opened on schedule in September, 2010. The total cost of the archaeological work, roughly $160,000 dollars, was a tiny fraction (less than half of one percent) of the overall cost of the project. Starting that fall, the school began to realize Bill Gurney’s vision of how the archaeology might benefit the students. I was invited to give a presentation on the site to the entire student body, and I have returned each fall to present the site’s story to the new 6th grade class. Social studies and science teachers have incorporated data from the site into their curriculum, and raised money for the construction of an educational boardwalk extending into Tenant Swamp that includes signage on the archaeological excavation and the lives of the people who lived on that same spot so long ago. In an era when government regulations of all kinds are under unprecedented attack from those who would like no limits on private power, the regulations that required the archaeological study at Keene Middle School did what such regulations do when they work best: balance competing interests in a way that provides enduring benefit to the community. Keene and its neighboring communities have a fine new school that will serve thousands of children; they also have artifacts and history from a rare and irreplaceable archaeological site that was saved. Information from this site is being used to create a new and humbling awareness among the young that history did not begin in 1620, of just how far back the human story goes, how much of that story belongs to the Abenaki and their ancestors, and what it might have been like to be twelve years old, listening to the mix of your mother’s songs and the howling winds of the Younger Dryas, waiting for the warmth of spring.
Robert Goodby is a Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Honors Program at Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, New Hampshire, USA. He is an archaeologist with over three decades of experience excavating Native American sites in New England, and served as the Principal Investigator for the excavations at the Tenant Swamp Paleoindian site.
