Episode 5š Archaeology at the Sharrow Site œ Milo, Maine (HD)

Hello and welcome to the Sharrow and Brigham Archaeological Preserves located near Milo in central Maine. Thank you so much for joining us today for this tour of these incredibly important sites that have informed our understanding of more than 10,000 years of prehistoric life in the region. Both of these sites are located near the confluence of the Now these rivers were incredibly important for subsistence to the people who were living here who would have trapped and fished on the river in addition to hunting and gathering from the surrounding region. Everything we know about these sites comes from the excavations that have taken place here which have uncovered a deeply stratified site with clear cultural levels containing many features and artifacts. Some of these include projectile points, brownstone tools, hearths, floral and faunal remains and much more. Because of the quality of preservation at this site in conjunction with a very long period of human habitation both sites are considered incredibly significant and were listed on the National Register of Confluence Archaeological District. Now the Conservancy permits excavations on all of its preserves. Generally this is done when a professional archaeologist approaches us with a valid research proposal. However in some cases this looks a little bit different when we work with state and local municipalities who are undertaking infrastructure or utility projects. This is the case at Sharo where the Maine Department of Transportation is moving forward with the much-needed replacement of the Milo Toll Bridge over the Piscataquis River. We were able to work with the Maine Department of Transportation and the Maine Historical Preservation Commission to develop a plan in which we will undertake excavations on a portion of the site to mitigate the potential impact of new construction. Today we'll be joined by State Archaeologist Art Spies and Archaeologist John Mosher both with the Maine Historical Preservation Commission who will take us around the site and tell us a little bit about the history of the excavations that have taken place here and what's being found now. We're in the National Register Piscataquis Confluence Prehistoric Archaeological District in Milo in central Maine. Here in the middle of Maine three smaller rivers come together dropping down out of the foothills onto lower terrain and for 10,000 years periodic floods have deposited river silt and built up deposits with six feet or more of stratified archaeological layers on these river shores. In the most recent flood of 1987 the river waters rose to flow over the deck of the toll bridge behind me. The bottoms of these sites are washed glacial till rocky material from the end of the Ice Age so this river overflow has been going on here with people living on these riverbanks for 10,000 years. The National Register District area of 42 acres of river and riverbank contains five stratified archaeological sites that record Native American life from just after the end of the Ice Age until Europeans arrived. The Brigham site and the Sherrill site we are working on now are the two deepest and best preserved sequences of cultural layers from this early period in northern New England. A radiocarbon date of 10,200 years dates the lowest occupation layer of the Brigham site which is about 300 yards upstream. These sites were excavated by the late James B. Peterson and colleagues in the 1980s. The Indians who lived here were hunters and gatherers living in a densely forested environment traveling by canoe and on foot. What we find are vertically well-separated buried soils with fire hearths post stone tools and stone tool making debris, ceramic pot fragments during the most recent 2,500 years, wood and plant charcoal, and burned or calcined food animal bone fragments. The acid soil destroys unburned bone so the archaeological bone is a record of food animal bone that was deliberately tossed into the fire hearths. The food animal bones from the site include moose, bear, muskrat, and beaver, and turtles. The largest number of bones come from fish including trout and migratory or catadromous species of eel, chad, and salmon. The Sherrill site is located in the narrows or rips or rapids in the river and it's a perfect place to harvest fish runs. It appears that chad and salmon were the focus of spring and summer fishing and eels were a fall fishing focus beginning with the earliest occupations on the river about eight to nine thousand years ago. It is likely that there was a fish weir or some sort of fish trap maybe built with stone associated with these rapids rebuilt and repaired and reused over millennia. At various times people ate beech nut, acorn, hazelnut, and berries such as elderberry. There was no corn or bean agriculture and no sign of sunflower or goosefoot or the other eastern complex domesticated foods east of the Kennebec River and here in Milo until after Europeans arrived. Curiously however, the Sherrill site has yielded the oldest identified squash rind fragment in the northeast radiocarbon dated about 6,400 years ago. This is genus Cucurbita, a squash or gourd fragment that must have been domesticated or at least intentionally tended and harvested because this genus does not grow wild in the northeast. Perhaps the hard squash rind itself is used as a fish or net float or container. The identification by Nancy Ashe Seidel is a big deal showing the hunter-gatherers were growing and managing plants in the woods of central Maine for thousands of years before domesticated plants were regularly used as food. As anthropologists we have to look more closely at reasons why people did or did not put effort into growing plants for food. Identified charcoal and animal bone can be read as a local paleoenvironmental record and Indian economic record over these 9,000 years. The local riverbank forest was mixed hardwood softwood of fir and pine, oak and maple, birch, beech, ash, basswood and elm with some minor variation as climate warmed and then cooled in recent millennia. Sherrill site is a type site for the most important evidence of native culture history from about 10,000 to about 4,000 years ago in interior northern New England. Jim Peterson and his colleagues including Brian Robinson revolutionized our archaeological understanding in the early 1980s and demonstrated that native culture was different in the Penobscot River Valley here and north and east compared with southern New England. This different culture clearly recognized first at the Sherrill site is called the Gulf of Maine Archaic and is characterized by relatively poorly made stone tools using local rock often river cobbles and very poorly made stone spear points. Between 6,000 and 9,000 years ago there was a clear cultural contrast between Gulf of Maine archaic folk and people further south who made beautiful stone tools. We suspect that the Gulf of Maine archaic folk were arming their spears with ground slate and ground bone points not flaked stone points. In any case by 7,000 years or so ago the cultural boundary between these two cultures was the Kennebec River which is west of here and southern Maine and southern New England and the Atlantic seaboard as far south as the Carolinas being related groups and the folks here in the Penobscot River and east and north being different. We don't know how these groups were biologically related and how they may be biologically related to the modern tribes here today because of lack of ancient DNA studies. We can assume that there is some continuity based on modern Wabanaki traditions but the details are not yet available with science. Okay John Bolger, what do we have going on here? The upper part of the column from about here to the surface is DOT fill that was dumped over the site and spread after the 1987 flood which washed out the north bridge approach and underneath it is a 19th century plow zone and is probably in two layers. There's a darker one here followed by a slightly lighter one in color here and they should date probably no earlier than around 1820. And beneath them and I should say that the plow zone also took out the original forest soil so what is left of that that interface between the plow and an orange bee horizon is just this thing right here and some of that might possibly be living surface. Based on the artifacts it probably dates to around anywhere from between around 3000 to about 2000 years ago and unfortunately here it's been heavily disturbed by rodent burrows and a big tree root burn that ran through the unit this so a lot of that wall is kind of in bad shape. But over here we've got probably original living surface here so this would be the early ceramic period so that would be 3000 to about 2000 years ago followed by probably some bee horizon development beneath it. Again more root burn and that kind of thing but then we've got a second big horizon here that we've identified we called it feature 15 because it was absolutely loaded with burned animal bone, charcoal, and probably some flake stone for making tools. And that interestingly enough makes a big dive down here it's sort of conformable to the way the landform is and then it terminates on on these stones that were in it. Below that is more flood deposit there the the sediment is much finer indicating that the water velocity is a lot lower. It contains lots of activity of basically people would go down to the cobble bank bring up stone that looked like it was useful for stone tools break them apart and make various kinds of tools out of them or they were going after the flakes it's hard to say but anyway that zone of material basically from the bottom of the orange to right about to the top of the of the cobbles in the floor and artifacts that we found associated with them in this unit and where Bill is are full channel gouges which should date somewhere between probably six and eight thousand years ago so that that's a pretty good indication of the logical terms it's called the Gulf of Maine but there's there's lots of scrapers there's the ground stone tools lots of flakes and cores and that kind of thing but virtually no spear points. And then the bottom surface is an eroded till surface that was here scoured out at the end of the Pleistocene and then the river sediment began building up on top of that and this stuff is really really compact and right up above it so would be right about in here there was a flood pulse of coarser material including a whole thing of gravel so definitely indications of different flood regimes through here. Working our way from the youngest to the oldest artifacts that have come out of the excavations this year this is a piece of what's known as vignette one pottery it's it's got fabric paddled on the interior and exterior surfaces and this is diagnostic of a period from about three thousand years ago to about 2100. Along with it a different unit but probably the same time period is a drill so it's a stone drill flaked on laterally both this way and then the tip is missing but this was found in the plow zone so probably contemporaneous with that but almost impossible to say. So down below the ceramic period level so into this top stuff that I pointed out earlier we got what's Susquehanna tradition and this is the tip of a Atlantic phase biface that would have been about probably something about like that size. I haven't found the base of that yet but hopefully soon. So this would be probably around 3800 years old to about maybe 34-3500. Below that is the Gulf of Maine archaic material so that's lots of the quartz and rhyolite flaking debris that just covered everything. An example of this is an exhausted quartz core and based on the size of the flaking scars on it probably the goal was to obtain flakes to use for various kinds of other tools. This is probably in the order of six to eight thousand years. Those are all little rhyolite flakes see but they were the raw materials transported down here by the glacier. Another kind of tool that's similar to this that's common in this kind of toolkit is our various kinds of end scrapers and again it would be about the same age. This is a made from kineo rhyolite which could have been obtained right off the beach. We've also got various kinds of fragments of ground stone. Hard to say what this was going to be although it looks like it might have been part of a gouge because it's kind of scooped out here. But we have an even better one is this. This is the pole end of a full channel gouge that would date to about six to eight thousand and possibly even older. But it was probably broken during use making who knows what dugout canoes or a significant amount of damage. And all of this marking here is pecking to shape it and then this was carefully ground out with an abrasive stone. Now I would like to tell you a story about Mike Brigham. The Shero and Brigham sites in the Archaeological Conservancy. Mike passed away a year ago at age 70. He grew up in Milo and his family owned a house a couple of hundred yards up the road. His mother published the local newspaper and Mike was a printer. They were in the printing presses. He went to the University of Maine, studied anthropology and archaeology and was a Maine Archaeological Society board member for about 40 years. He gradually left the printing business and worked more and more as a professional archaeologist, crew member and then a supervisor with Jim Peterson and others at the University of Maine at Farmington and the New England Archaeology Research Center. Along with other avocational archaeologists he collected artifacts from the riverbanks right here. Mike is responsible for starting the professional work at these sites because in 1982 he carefully excavated a five foot deep trench in what we now call the Brigham site for covering chip quartz and charcoal from the bottom layer. He ran a radiocarbon date on the charcoal and it came back 10,290 years plus or minus 400. That got everyone's attention and started the professional testing of these sites. Later Mike bought the Brigham site personally to have as a woodlot. Then in 1999 he sold the Brigham site to the Archaeological Conservancy at cost and he convinced the Shero family to subdivide off seven and a half acres and sell the Shero site to the Conservancy as well. So without Mike Brigham we would not be sitting here today and we would know a lot less about Maine archaeology. The Archaeological Conservancy considers the Shero and Brigham sites some of the most important archaic sites that we have preserved in the east. With clearly defined stratigraphic levels dating back from 10,000 years to 3,000 years before present in addition to later woodland periods or ceramic period deposits and historic deposits, these sites have the potential to tell us about a very very long period of human occupation. We were fortunate enough to acquire these two sites about 20 years ago in 1999 when Olga Shero, the previous owner of the Shero site, agreed to sell the property to the Conservancy for permanent preservation. At that time Michael Brigham, who had acquired the Brigham site as we learned earlier, also agreed to divest that property to the Conservancy so it would be permanently preserved and protected in perpetuity. The research on these sites, including the current work that's taking place on Shero, has tremendous potential to help us better understand the people who lived here and how their cultures and technology changed over a very long period of time. In addition, this research can inform other aspects of that time period including climatic change, the importance of these rivers for settlement, and how people shaped the environment around them. So thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you enjoyed your tour.