-
6 The “Indian Planting Fields” in Concord, Massachusetts: Influence of New Techniques on Archaeological Explanatory Models
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
6 The “Indian Planting Fields” in Concord, Massachusetts Influence of New Techniques on Archaeological Explanatory Models Shirley Blancke In the 1990s the Concord Cemetery Committee started plans to expand the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. The field that would become the extension was an area where collectors had picked up Native American artifacts since the end of the nineteenth century and was thought to be the site where Indian planting fields existed at the founding of the town in 1635. These “planting fields,” together with a weir, were mentioned in a 1637 deed as given in exchange for wampum, tools, and clothing by the Native people of the Musketaquid River to the Concord founding fathers (Shattuck 1835, 6). Concord was the earliest English community founded inland from Boston. This field, then, promised to be a place where remains of Native American settlement such as wigwams, corn storage pits, and graves might be found. This chapter describes two features, a Late Archaic fire pit, and a fifteenth-century A.D. Late Woodland living floor, together with the role played by soil micromorphology in determining what they were. In addition, thin-section analysis identified two unusual lithic types, mylonite and amphibolite. In expanding the town cemetery there was, ironically, a real danger of destroying Native American graves protected by law. The cemetery committee consulted Blancke and decided to contract for an archaeological survey. A survey also raised the real possibility of finding evidence of Concord’s Native past with respect to shelter and agriculture, 119 120 Shirley Blancke specifically wigwams and maize. Over a three-year period, 1997–1999, an archaeological survey and excavation were conducted in the field into which the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery was to expand. Although the chances of finding maize preserved in a planting field might be slight, there was some reason to think that the edge of the site might yield habitation loci where maize might be found. No maize was in fact recovered. The prospect of finding Native maize was of particular interest to Betty Little, who was specializing in the technology of accurately dating early Native maize samples, and she subsequently demonstrated a clustering of radiocarbon dates for maize in New England around cal A.D. 1300–1500 (Little 2002). Site Background The expansion field is southwest of the Great Meadows Wildlife Sanctuary, which has natural resources that were a magnet for Native life starting at the end of the Pleistocene. Thirty years ago a long, narrow, 6-inch Late Paleo-Indian spear point of the Ste. Anne/Varney type was found sticking down vertically in the mud at the river’s edge, where it may have snapped from its shaft in the course of fishing or hunting (Bradley 2007; Concord Museum 2007). The name “Musketaquid” was first applied to the river on a 1634 map made by the English settler William Wood (Wood 1977[1634]) and means a place of reeds or grasses in the Algonquian language. The sanctuary is currently an area of man-made ponds created out of former swampland and water meadow on the south side of the Concord River and immediately abutting it. It is an area rich in wildlife, with turtles, muskrats, otters, and many other species, particularly birds, which attracts bird-watchers from many miles around. Large numbers of Native American artifacts have been collected from fields surrounding the sanctuary. The expansion field was part of an area named “Cranefields” or “The Great Fields” in some nineteenth-century maps (Walcott 1885, in Wheeler 1967, 28; Gleason 1906). The Concord Cemetery Committee planned to create a rolling landscape reminiscent of the Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts , by grading the flat expansion field. Nothing was visible above ground to indicate the existence of any past history, neither a Native past suggested by the artifacts, nor anything more recent. Three archaeological sites had been recorded for the general area in the Massachusetts Historical Commission’s site files identified by artifacts in Benjamin Smith’s collection at the Concord Museum, but only one had been excavated previously by Blancke (1987, 1988). The field had also been [52.23.203.254] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:34 GMT) 121 The “Indian Planting Fields” in Concord, Massachusetts plowed since the seventeenth century and was acquired in 1853 by the trustees of the Middlesex Agricultural Society. This society, founded in 1794, held cattle shows in Concord from 1820 onward, erecting stock pens and an exhibition shed in...