Dozens of visitors got the chance to see the first day of archeological testing at a site in Rindge on Sunday, where Franklin Pierce University students, led by professor Bob Goodby, had just begun to discover evidence of Native American presence.
The Rindge Conservation Commission capped off its summer hiking series on Sunday with its most-popular hike of the season, attended by so many interested residents the hike was split into two groups. The hike explored side trails along the Monadnock Rail Trail, with views of the Contoocook Marsh Area. But the main draw of the hike was a stop along the trail, where a group of Franklin Pierce students were digging test pits to screen for artifacts.
“Just today, we started testing this area here, and we have excavated 16 test pits, and found artifacts in six of them,” Goodby said.
The artifacts found, Goodby said, “are not dramatic,” but still convey a lot of information about the people who left them.
Goodby, who specializes in New England Native American sites, said he began to look for potential sites closer to the Franklin Pierce campus in Rindge in recent years, particularly in close proximity to water sources such as the Contoocook River.
“These folks traveled by water. They need water to drink. They fish. So, sites are close to water. And they’re going to be on sites that are level, and where the underlying soil is sandy and dry, so when it rains they’re not living in mud,” Goodby said. “You take all of this into account, and you look for spots like that. And the other wild card is it’s somewhere I can get permission to dig.”
Goodby was given permission by a private landowner, as well as the towns of Jaffrey and Rindge, to dig test pits on several points along the Monadnock Rail Trail. Its proximity to water was promising, but there had also been prior signs of Native Americans along the trailway discovered in the past.
“The old histories say – and boy, I wish they’d given more detail – the old histories say that when they built the railroads in the 1860s, they found traces of the original inhabitants. So, they were seeing something there that said, ‘Indians.’ And for a railroad crew to be seeing that, it had to be pretty dramatic, I think,” Goodby said.
The artifacts found by Goodby’s students on Sunday were less dramatic – chips of stone, left by sharpening stone tools. But they still carry interesting information. One chip found, for example, was a good-quality quartzite. Goodby said it likely came from a tool which was made from quartzite mined from a large formation in Vermont, called the Cheshire formation, that runs from Vermont to Northern Massachusetts.
Other chips found in Rindge, Goodby said, likely came from the Hudson River Valley in New York.
“So, that tells you something about the size of the world these people lived in. They were not isolated,” Goodby said.
It’s unlikely the chips are from tool-making, which would have left significantly more chips as evidence, but from people sharpening tools they already had, which is why the stone came from a variety of different sources.
Goodby said that while his class has discovered artifacts at all four sites in Jaffrey and Rindge they have tested this year, there are issues that inherently come with digging in New England soil that have made the process difficult. For one, much of it has been developed. Even at the site off the rail trail where the students were working Sunday showed signs of disturbance, along with a well site that suggested it might have been considered for a residence at one point.
“If you look around us, this is a nice place for a site. It’s level, it’s sandy, you’ve got wetlands, you’ve got the lake,” Goodby said. “But look at it – there’s no trees. It was logged. It was stumped, and everywhere you see this moss growing is a sign of disturbed soil underneath it. So much of what was here is either badly disturbed, or completely gone.”
Most of the artifacts found at the sites students have been excavating are found close to the top of the soil – within 30 centimeters or so, Goodby said. Therefor, activities such as logging or stumping can destroy archeological evidence. New England also has an acidic soil, which breaks down organic material such as leather, hide, wood or bone.
“That’s one of the challenges we have,” Goodby said.
For those interested in learning more about Native American presence in the Monadnock region, Goodby has written a book, “A Deep Presence: 13,000 Years of Native American History,” about Abenaki tribes in southwestern New Hampshire.