Outreach Highlights
October 2009

Archaeological Field School 2009: At the Trowel’s Edge

Up to their necks in history, as they were, you might have avoided interrupting the students and faculty from the UMass Amherst Archaeological Field School at work in their summer digs in and around the old Frary House in Historic Deerfield this past summer.

That would have been a mistake, especially for anyone interested in the colonial legacy of the Connecticut River valley.

Reaching out from the depths of an excavation pit is central to what the program is about, noted Quentin Lewis, field director for the 2009 Field School and UMass Amherst doctoral candidate, as a steady stream of tourists filed by on a fine August morning.

“Answering questions and describing what we’re doing connects us to the community, and makes it more personal,” said Lewis. “But it also calls on our ability to reflect on and interpret what we are doing on the spot, and to form a narrative.”

“You could say that it not only makes for better community relations, but it also makes for better anthropology as well,” he said.

Through the Archaeological Field School, UMass Amherst’s Department of Anthropology in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Historic Deerfield Inc. continue to build on a rich research collaboration initiated by Professor Robert Paynter in 1982. The program extends Paynter’s long fascination with the English settlement established at Deerfield in the mid-17th century, and the sometimes tragic interaction between European and native populations. The five-week program draws students, and sometimes professionals, from all over.

The program is offered through UMass Amherst Continuing & Professional Education and provides students with practical experience in and exposure to the tools, techniques and latest thinking in field archaeology. Faculty, including Paynter, Project Director Brian Jones, and Professor Elizabeth Chilton oversee the program with assistance from a team of graduate students.

Incorporated in 1952 to help preserve the heritage of the colonial village, Historic Deerfield has restored 11 historic homes on what is known as “The Street.” Most of the buildings, along with the Flynt Center of Early New England life – with its display collections of more than 25,000 items made or used between 1650 and 1850 – are open to the public and draw thousands of visitors every year.

At the same time, however, much of the village has been radically altered over the centuries, first in a succession of bloody frontier battles between 1660 and 1704, and later by restorations and recreations that may have had as much to do with myths and fantasies about early settlement life as with historical accuracy, and most recently by Historic Deerfield’s almost seamless relationship with the Deerfield Academy preparatory school.

This reinterpretation, far from destroying the archaeological value of Deerfield Village sites, is part of what makes it so interesting, according to Brian Jones. The pits being excavated and combed for debris – often the remnants of garbage that at one time was simply tossed out the window of a homestead – reveal information not only about early inhabitants, but also about how subsequent inhabitants view their predecessors. Jones estimated the layer being explored by students as he spoke with passersby could be dated to about 1830.

“Each layer not only gives us new clues, but also tells us something about the process of interpretation, and the cultural context for interpretation at any time. What people have chosen to preserve, or not, tells us a lot about their culture and its values,” said Jones, pointing to the clear stratifications in a new pit just to the north of the Frary House.

Anthropologist Ian Hodder has called this archaeological process “interpretation at the trowel’s edge,” noted Quentin Lewis.

“Each subsequent generation uses the past to interpret the present,” he said.

It would be hard to find a better example of this phenomenon than the Frary House and Barnard Tavern, according to Field School student Bethany Crawford, an Alabama native and senior anthropology major at the College of Charleston. She was rounding out her minor in archaeology through the program this summer.

It all began about 13,000 years ago, said Crawford, when glacial Lake Hitchcock receded, leaving fertile ground and lots of room for human habitation and transportation. When the first English settlers arrived around 1650, they found fields well tended and cultivated by the Pocumtuck people who had long lived there.

The Frary House was built not long afterward, but was burned in the fabled French and Native American raid of 1704, which claimed the lives of Samson Frary and his family. Rebuilt in roughly the same spot between 1719 and 1726 and sold to Joseph Barnard in 1752, the house came to incorporate the Barnard Tavern, which was added in the late eighteenth century. Over the years the house also came to incorporate a general store.

Later in the eighteenth century, the house was bought by Frary descendent Charlotte Alice Baker, author of True Stories of New England Captives Carried to Canada During the Old French and Indian Wars (1897). Despite her fascination with family history, Baker’s restoration of the house reflected her Victorian values and vision of the past, and her enchantment with the Arts and Crafts Movement.

“Even the paint chips we find from that period tell us a good deal,” said Crawford, describing the technique of applying paint to wet plaster, a nineteenth century phenomenon.

In fact, said Quentin Lewis, every generation appears to embody its fantasies of the past in the decisions a community makes about restoration and preservation. He added that even Henry and Helen Flynt, who spearheaded the creation of Historic Deerfield and the restoration of its houses, appear to have connected to the colonial past in part through the Cold War vigilance of the 1950s – in effect, raising the stockade against attack all over again.

Finding nothing during a dig can tell nearly as much as finding a great deal, noted Jones. After a long dry spell, however – a gravel layer that turned out to be grounding for a fairly contemporary oil tank, for instance – there was an unexpected find. The group unearthed a late 17th or early 18th century cellar on the north side of the house, along with a number of English yellow slipware fragments – called “sherds” – along with clay pipe bowls and a worked-sheet brass fragment.

“This was quite a remarkable find and likely represents a temporary structure built to house some of the family while the original or reconstructed Frary house was being constructed,” said Jones. “To date we have too few artifacts to determine whether its age is circa 1695 or 1725.”

Perhaps most interesting, he added, was the fact that the cellar sediments also contained hundreds of fish scales, which promise to provide direct information about the use of resources gathered from the Deerfield and Connecticut rivers by these early settlers. The scales can tell researchers a good deal about the local diet and help indicate the season of harvest – information that will likely cause excitement among both archaeologists and regional biologists.

“Fish scales represent an uncommon find on archaeological sites of any period,” said Jones. “The ecology of the river we know today bears little resemblance to that of the 17th and early 18th centuries. Overall, these scales provide an extremely rare opportunity to better understand the ecosystem of the Connecticut River before dams and mills devastated its fish populations.”