Archaeology students excavate
8,000-year-old site in Hatfield

by Sarah R. Buchholz, Chronicle staff

Trinity College junior James Redicker, takes soil samples from a prehistoric living floor where ceramic fragments and stone tools were found. (Stan Sherer photo)

our graduate teachers, an assistant professor and 20 Continuing Education students sifted through dirt at a Hatfield farm early this summer to learn more about the life of native peoples in the Connecticut River Valley 8,000 years ago.

     Their efforts were part of an archaeological field school, taught by assistant professor of Anthropology Elizabeth Chilton and offered biannually through Continuing Education. The group found post molds from wigwams, fire hearths, a prehistoric living floor 1.5 feet below the surface, clay pipes, remnants from making stone tools, and bits of burned bones.

     "It's a real excavation involving real research," Chilton said, "but it's also a training program. We did some national advertising for the school, and we had such an overwhelming response." Participants in the class included a retired attorney from Seattle and students from Yale, Trinity College, and the Five Colleges.

     They shared their findings publicly by washing, cataloging and analyzing the artifacts they found in an open lab at Moors House in Historic Deerfield over a three-week period. One of the graduate teachers conducted interpretive tours of Deerfield, explaining what is known about native peoples of the area and their presence in and around Deerfield. The last stop on each tour was the lab where students were working.
The tours were funded by a grant from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities and allowed the class to fulfill an outreach mission, as well as an academic one, Chilton said. She hopes the tours and the open lab helped visitors to Deerfield understand that native peoples were active in the Valley long after settlement by European Americans.

     "Native peoples continue to use the Valley in the 19th century and even the 20th century," Chilton said, "but that's not what you learn in school."

     Artifacts from the class's field work are still being analyzed.

     "On this project it seems like we spend about 10 days in the lab for every field day," Chilton said. "Archaeology is by definition a destructive enterprise, so there needs to be photo documentation and written documentation. Hopefully this will tell us how people were living up to 8,000 years ago. And there is evidence that this site was used all the way up to the 17th century.

     "Our goals were to teach students the basics of archaeology field and lab methods." To prepare students for field work, Chilton spent three days exclusively in the classroom with them, talking about things like soil formation, artifact analysis, dating, and geological and native history of the Connecticut Valley because the research emphasis of the course is on the native people of southern New England.

     "We're looking at about 11,000 years ago to the present," Chilton said.

     When the course was over, in an effort to preserve the site for future research, the class re-covered the area with dirt. Chilton said artifact hunters have rummaged through the site in the past, and she and others are trying to protect its research value from looters.