today I want to talk about three really
exciting 17th century sights that I’ve
been exploring in the towns of
Glastonbury in Windsor Connecticut these
sights are providing really interesting
new information about day-to-day life
during the 17th century by some of the
first English settlers of the
Connecticut River Valley this is a
period of time we don’t actually know
very much about very very little
archeology has happened in Connecticut
so this is all very exciting and new
stuff all three sites were used or who
were found using ground-penetrating
radar a technology that literally allows
us to see under the ground and find
secrets that have been buried in this
case for centuries
so ground-penetrating radar is not
actually very new technology you could
buy a ground-penetrating radar unit back
in the 1970s and then the mid 80s we had
a group come out and explored the
Revolutionary War site and for Griswold
and Groton and you can see here the guy
lugging around a pretty heavy instrument
and he’s cabled to the back of his van
where a lot of the instruments are
located so things have gotten a little
bit easier as you’ll see in some of the
later slides but basically the
technology has been around for a while
ground-penetrating radar works in a
nutshell by sending high-frequency radio
waves into the ground which bounced back
differentially based on subtle changes
in soil and often this is things like
moisture levels that affect the
electrical resistivity of the ground we
don’t have to worry about the details of
that much
now ground-penetrating radar does not
see tiny objects in the ground very well
but it is pretty good at seeing
large-scale areas of disturbance and
often these things can be caused by
human beings when they’re digging things
building houses and activities like that
now penetrating radar is commonly used
in cemetary sites and one of the things
I was kind of first surprised by when I
started my job as the state
archaeologist in 2014 was the number of
questions I got about cemeteries and
people asking for help finding unmarked
burials so this is when I met Debbie
Sarabia in the state soil scientist
could see Debbie right there on the left
Debbie had been working with the prior
State Archaeologist for many years doing
similar radar surveys and basically was
on these cemetery surveys that I got to
know Debbie and I started asking myself
why we weren’t using radar like this on
more truly archaeological sites now one
of my first goals was to investigate the
Windsor palisade
this was a large fortification built
around the center of old Windsor which
was settled around 1635 and this
palisade was built to protect its
inhabitants during the Pequot War that
came shortly after that now for decades
historians and archaeologists have been
really curious about the exact location
of this fortification despite the fact
that it’s actually was very well
documented in the 1600s by Matthew grant
one of the town clerks and a land
surveyor and its general location in
space was known because it wasn’t a
mystery it was located at the end of
palisade au Avenue I was convinced that
with radar we could go out there and in
a short matter of time find clear
evidence of the run of this
fortification wall
however everywhere debby and I checked
we failed to find any evidence of this
thing however the southeastern corner of
the palisade Oh area did produce a very
strange anomaly in the ground this was
basically a rectangular signature that
debby identified it was like six feet
deep and 18 feet across and we realized
this was probably a filled in house
cellar that was no longer visible at all
on the surface we’re basically in
someone’s backyard it was a lovely green
yard nothing to see because of that we
said well let’s shift our investigations
over this site we started doing some
excavation there and we found bits of
you know broken brick not too exciting
broken window glass but then we started
getting things like clay pipes and
ceramics that were more dateable and
realizing we were getting artifacts from
the 1600s and very early seventeen
hundreds so this was kind of an
important site one that really hadn’t
been found in town yet therefore I went
over to the Windsor Historical Society
we dug into the low
land records a little bit more and we
soon realized that this was actually the
house lot of captain John Mason now
Mason is not really a household name
anymore but back in the 1600s he was one
of Connecticut’s leading men he was in
charge of the Connecticut colonial
militia and he was actually the one who
led the raid on the Pequot village of
mystic that resulted in the deaths of
hundreds of native people so he’s an
important historical figure and he’s
also a very controversial one
so finding his actual house site was
pretty freakin amazing right this was
great but we didn’t really want to stop
there we continued using radar to search
for additional sites we very
successfully just identified the house
side of Francis Stiles at the north end
of town and Stiles was one of Windsor’s
founding fathers basically one of the
very first inhabitants of the town sent
there to help set up for the lords and
gentlemen who were to follow him but
even more important we found a
remarkable huge farm complex in South
Glastonbury so the Hollister site is
located in a beautiful horse pasture
down by the Connecticut River and
there’s nothing at the surface that
would provide any evidence that there is
anything of any interest or you know
importance hidden underneath the grass
out there but I was approached
approached by the glass very Historical
Society and one of the Hollister
descendants who actually owns the
property still to do an investigation to
see if we couldn’t find this site
somewhere in this big horse pasture as
the date was approaching that I was
supposed to run a sort of public
archeology dig for people in town I got
anxious and I called a UConn grad
student I knew who was also a GPR
technician and said hey Peter his name
is Peter leach
can you come out to the site like the
day before run a little radar let’s see
if we can find somewhere to start this
excavation obligingly Peter came out
started doing radar and immediately
started finding all sorts of features
now his his radar produced in the end a
huge map what we’re seeing here is
something the size of a football field
so you have the scale and it does not
take an expert to start seeing that
there’s very interesting features
popping up in the soil
so you see these big rectangles these
are all house sellers there’s a well
here we’re at the surface again diving
down 10 centimeters of time and I a
fourth large seller feature over here
and lots of weird pits and odd objects
and things like that
Peter was actually blown away by this
despite the fact that he’d been doing
radar surveys for a very long time this
was kind of one of the most amazing
things he’d found it turns out the soils
at this site are just so conducive to
radar work that it’s just an ideal
setting now Peters work was followed up
on two years ago by two students from
the University of Denver Maeve Herrick
and jasmine Saxon they built on Peters
grid and went over a much larger area
and continued to find evidence of
additional features another house seller
and probably most remarkably three very
likely Native American house floors at
the south end of the site okay
in the two years that we’ve had to start
investigating the contents of some of
these cellars we have found some pretty
remarkable finds on the left is a piece
of North Italian marbleized slip
decorated earthenware this is very fancy
stuff and frankly only shows up and
really the wealthiest households even in
Europe it’s very rarely found in the new
world at all it tells us something about
the status of the Hollister family in
their access to these items as sort of
very high quality
it’s likely that this was an heirloom
piece that was passed through the family
for a couple generations because this
stuff is usually manufactured between
about 1600 and 1650 and we know the farm
probably was not inhabited till after
about 1640 and was abandoned about 1711
now we also found a remarkable amount of
really well-preserved animal and food
remains basically these tell us a lot
about the English diet of the Hollister
family at the site we see traditional
farm animals and farmed crops at one
might see in Europe but we have also a
remarkable number of hunted and fished
game shellfish and also gathered food
remains things that we would more
typically see on a Native American site
so this is providing evidence that these
first English inhabitants of the
Connecticut River Valley were sort of
hybridizing their diet taking advantage
of crops and hunted food used by Native
American people that they were now the
neighbors of and incorporating them into
their diet this is really one of the
first cases we’re seeing such strong
evidence of this in addition to that on
the right this is Maeve Herrick one of
our GPR experts out there from Denver
she’s holding a huge Native American
potsherd now we found hundreds of
pottery sherds in the english scholars
at this site that provide clear evidence
that the hollister family members were
incorporating Native American pottery
into their normal kind of household
goods and that these pots eventually
broke and were discarded and dumped into
these cellars when the house is
abandoned along with all the European
wares that they had as well all of these
things are together are telling us about
a much more complex story of the
interactions between the Hollister
family and their Wang junk neighbors and
on top of that the existence of these
three native house floors at the south
end of the site one of which we
determine this summer to date to the
exact period is the rest of the house we
know they’re not hundreds of years
earlier for example they tell us that in
many cases these English families may
have had much more complex and
interesting relationships with their
native neighbors and we usually consider
we usually sort of think of the
hostilities but in this case we have
very clear evidence of sort of very
close relationships it is likely that
this native family or more than one
native family was living on the farm
perhaps working for the Hollister’s and
through that relationship had direct
access to European goods that they were
really interested in okay so before I
end I want to just share this one short
video it’s like a one-minute clip of one
of the moments of discovery working in
the South cellar
that may even Jasmin located in their
radar this is one we just did last
August all right we’re gonna remove this
really interesting jug fragment it’s
probably not much bigger than what we
can see here but I’ve got Lee working on
it
we’re gonna kind of go around the edges
gently until it starts to wiggle but I
thought this would be kind of a fun
moment to share
hold up let’s see let’s turn it over
lovely lovely glaze on the interior –
there’s our profile on our jug handles
sort of brush it off a little yeah that
is a nice fragment super and we have so
much of this stuff that it’s likely
gonna go back together interesting kind
of earthenware almost in the shape of a
Bellarmine jar but i think this is an
english made pot that’s what we do this
for right it’s those kind of moments
that are really precious even if someone
is jaded as I am and who’s been digging
a little bit too long so just to wrap up
I’d love to say that this old technology
of ground-penetrating radar has allowed
us to discover sites that we thought
either no longer existed or were simply
too hard to find
in fact just no one in the last hundred
years in Connecticut has really been
doing much research in this direction so
we’ve been able to show just in the last
three years that these sites are out
there that some of them are remarkably
well preserved and that using the right
tools we can definitely find them so
ground-penetrating radar is really
allowing us to see beneath the surface
in a very literal way and uncover
secrets that have been hidden for
hundreds of years in the Connecticut
River Valley thanks very much
[Applause]
exciting 17th century sights that I’ve
been exploring in the towns of
Glastonbury in Windsor Connecticut these
sights are providing really interesting
new information about day-to-day life
during the 17th century by some of the
first English settlers of the
Connecticut River Valley this is a
period of time we don’t actually know
very much about very very little
archeology has happened in Connecticut
so this is all very exciting and new
stuff all three sites were used or who
were found using ground-penetrating
radar a technology that literally allows
us to see under the ground and find
secrets that have been buried in this
case for centuries
so ground-penetrating radar is not
actually very new technology you could
buy a ground-penetrating radar unit back
in the 1970s and then the mid 80s we had
a group come out and explored the
Revolutionary War site and for Griswold
and Groton and you can see here the guy
lugging around a pretty heavy instrument
and he’s cabled to the back of his van
where a lot of the instruments are
located so things have gotten a little
bit easier as you’ll see in some of the
later slides but basically the
technology has been around for a while
ground-penetrating radar works in a
nutshell by sending high-frequency radio
waves into the ground which bounced back
differentially based on subtle changes
in soil and often this is things like
moisture levels that affect the
electrical resistivity of the ground we
don’t have to worry about the details of
that much
now ground-penetrating radar does not
see tiny objects in the ground very well
but it is pretty good at seeing
large-scale areas of disturbance and
often these things can be caused by
human beings when they’re digging things
building houses and activities like that
now penetrating radar is commonly used
in cemetary sites and one of the things
I was kind of first surprised by when I
started my job as the state
archaeologist in 2014 was the number of
questions I got about cemeteries and
people asking for help finding unmarked
burials so this is when I met Debbie
Sarabia in the state soil scientist
could see Debbie right there on the left
Debbie had been working with the prior
State Archaeologist for many years doing
similar radar surveys and basically was
on these cemetery surveys that I got to
know Debbie and I started asking myself
why we weren’t using radar like this on
more truly archaeological sites now one
of my first goals was to investigate the
Windsor palisade
this was a large fortification built
around the center of old Windsor which
was settled around 1635 and this
palisade was built to protect its
inhabitants during the Pequot War that
came shortly after that now for decades
historians and archaeologists have been
really curious about the exact location
of this fortification despite the fact
that it’s actually was very well
documented in the 1600s by Matthew grant
one of the town clerks and a land
surveyor and its general location in
space was known because it wasn’t a
mystery it was located at the end of
palisade au Avenue I was convinced that
with radar we could go out there and in
a short matter of time find clear
evidence of the run of this
fortification wall
however everywhere debby and I checked
we failed to find any evidence of this
thing however the southeastern corner of
the palisade Oh area did produce a very
strange anomaly in the ground this was
basically a rectangular signature that
debby identified it was like six feet
deep and 18 feet across and we realized
this was probably a filled in house
cellar that was no longer visible at all
on the surface we’re basically in
someone’s backyard it was a lovely green
yard nothing to see because of that we
said well let’s shift our investigations
over this site we started doing some
excavation there and we found bits of
you know broken brick not too exciting
broken window glass but then we started
getting things like clay pipes and
ceramics that were more dateable and
realizing we were getting artifacts from
the 1600s and very early seventeen
hundreds so this was kind of an
important site one that really hadn’t
been found in town yet therefore I went
over to the Windsor Historical Society
we dug into the low
land records a little bit more and we
soon realized that this was actually the
house lot of captain John Mason now
Mason is not really a household name
anymore but back in the 1600s he was one
of Connecticut’s leading men he was in
charge of the Connecticut colonial
militia and he was actually the one who
led the raid on the Pequot village of
mystic that resulted in the deaths of
hundreds of native people so he’s an
important historical figure and he’s
also a very controversial one
so finding his actual house site was
pretty freakin amazing right this was
great but we didn’t really want to stop
there we continued using radar to search
for additional sites we very
successfully just identified the house
side of Francis Stiles at the north end
of town and Stiles was one of Windsor’s
founding fathers basically one of the
very first inhabitants of the town sent
there to help set up for the lords and
gentlemen who were to follow him but
even more important we found a
remarkable huge farm complex in South
Glastonbury so the Hollister site is
located in a beautiful horse pasture
down by the Connecticut River and
there’s nothing at the surface that
would provide any evidence that there is
anything of any interest or you know
importance hidden underneath the grass
out there but I was approached
approached by the glass very Historical
Society and one of the Hollister
descendants who actually owns the
property still to do an investigation to
see if we couldn’t find this site
somewhere in this big horse pasture as
the date was approaching that I was
supposed to run a sort of public
archeology dig for people in town I got
anxious and I called a UConn grad
student I knew who was also a GPR
technician and said hey Peter his name
is Peter leach
can you come out to the site like the
day before run a little radar let’s see
if we can find somewhere to start this
excavation obligingly Peter came out
started doing radar and immediately
started finding all sorts of features
now his his radar produced in the end a
huge map what we’re seeing here is
something the size of a football field
so you have the scale and it does not
take an expert to start seeing that
there’s very interesting features
popping up in the soil
so you see these big rectangles these
are all house sellers there’s a well
here we’re at the surface again diving
down 10 centimeters of time and I a
fourth large seller feature over here
and lots of weird pits and odd objects
and things like that
Peter was actually blown away by this
despite the fact that he’d been doing
radar surveys for a very long time this
was kind of one of the most amazing
things he’d found it turns out the soils
at this site are just so conducive to
radar work that it’s just an ideal
setting now Peters work was followed up
on two years ago by two students from
the University of Denver Maeve Herrick
and jasmine Saxon they built on Peters
grid and went over a much larger area
and continued to find evidence of
additional features another house seller
and probably most remarkably three very
likely Native American house floors at
the south end of the site okay
in the two years that we’ve had to start
investigating the contents of some of
these cellars we have found some pretty
remarkable finds on the left is a piece
of North Italian marbleized slip
decorated earthenware this is very fancy
stuff and frankly only shows up and
really the wealthiest households even in
Europe it’s very rarely found in the new
world at all it tells us something about
the status of the Hollister family in
their access to these items as sort of
very high quality
it’s likely that this was an heirloom
piece that was passed through the family
for a couple generations because this
stuff is usually manufactured between
about 1600 and 1650 and we know the farm
probably was not inhabited till after
about 1640 and was abandoned about 1711
now we also found a remarkable amount of
really well-preserved animal and food
remains basically these tell us a lot
about the English diet of the Hollister
family at the site we see traditional
farm animals and farmed crops at one
might see in Europe but we have also a
remarkable number of hunted and fished
game shellfish and also gathered food
remains things that we would more
typically see on a Native American site
so this is providing evidence that these
first English inhabitants of the
Connecticut River Valley were sort of
hybridizing their diet taking advantage
of crops and hunted food used by Native
American people that they were now the
neighbors of and incorporating them into
their diet this is really one of the
first cases we’re seeing such strong
evidence of this in addition to that on
the right this is Maeve Herrick one of
our GPR experts out there from Denver
she’s holding a huge Native American
potsherd now we found hundreds of
pottery sherds in the english scholars
at this site that provide clear evidence
that the hollister family members were
incorporating Native American pottery
into their normal kind of household
goods and that these pots eventually
broke and were discarded and dumped into
these cellars when the house is
abandoned along with all the European
wares that they had as well all of these
things are together are telling us about
a much more complex story of the
interactions between the Hollister
family and their Wang junk neighbors and
on top of that the existence of these
three native house floors at the south
end of the site one of which we
determine this summer to date to the
exact period is the rest of the house we
know they’re not hundreds of years
earlier for example they tell us that in
many cases these English families may
have had much more complex and
interesting relationships with their
native neighbors and we usually consider
we usually sort of think of the
hostilities but in this case we have
very clear evidence of sort of very
close relationships it is likely that
this native family or more than one
native family was living on the farm
perhaps working for the Hollister’s and
through that relationship had direct
access to European goods that they were
really interested in okay so before I
end I want to just share this one short
video it’s like a one-minute clip of one
of the moments of discovery working in
the South cellar
that may even Jasmin located in their
radar this is one we just did last
August all right we’re gonna remove this
really interesting jug fragment it’s
probably not much bigger than what we
can see here but I’ve got Lee working on
it
we’re gonna kind of go around the edges
gently until it starts to wiggle but I
thought this would be kind of a fun
moment to share
hold up let’s see let’s turn it over
lovely lovely glaze on the interior –
there’s our profile on our jug handles
sort of brush it off a little yeah that
is a nice fragment super and we have so
much of this stuff that it’s likely
gonna go back together interesting kind
of earthenware almost in the shape of a
Bellarmine jar but i think this is an
english made pot that’s what we do this
for right it’s those kind of moments
that are really precious even if someone
is jaded as I am and who’s been digging
a little bit too long so just to wrap up
I’d love to say that this old technology
of ground-penetrating radar has allowed
us to discover sites that we thought
either no longer existed or were simply
too hard to find
in fact just no one in the last hundred
years in Connecticut has really been
doing much research in this direction so
we’ve been able to show just in the last
three years that these sites are out
there that some of them are remarkably
well preserved and that using the right
tools we can definitely find them so
ground-penetrating radar is really
allowing us to see beneath the surface
in a very literal way and uncover
secrets that have been hidden for
hundreds of years in the Connecticut
River Valley thanks very much
[Applause]
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