Digging Up History: Part 1

Projectile Point Found at Passamaquoddy Dig Site 2019

This post was originally published June 22, 2023.

For many, it starts with an arrowhead. Some people spot them on a wooded trail, while the rest of us see them in black-and-white textbook photographs and behind museum display glass. I was one of the latter. As part of my pursuits into archaeology at a New England college, the majority of classes offered to me focused on Indigenous archaeology. Unfortunately, the only Indigenous archaeological dig offered during my time was canceled.

One year after graduating, I checked my old college email to find that applications were finally open for a coastal Maine dig working with the Passamaquoddy tribe. Despite my travels to different countries, countless visits to dozens of museums, and hundreds of hours learning about archaeological practices, I was always a little embarrassed to have never actually participated in a dig before. So I saw my chance, and threw my Indiana Jones hat into the ring.

Time for the necessary disclaimer that Indiana Jones is not what archaeology looks like—and honestly, thank God, because I’m not fast enough to outrun a giant rolling boulder. Archaeology in media is often portrayed more often as antiquarianism, which is the collecting of old and unique things. Early archaeology was antiquarianism, which is why some rich people have private collections of cultural artifacts from across the world that sometimes get sold or donated to museums. Over time though, a new wave of thought has challenged these old practices, and that thought focuses on context.

Evidence of Erosion at the Site 2019

It’s very exciting to see something foreign and unique. Sometimes you want to hold it, to maybe even keep it. It’s like seeing a beautiful flower in a garden, but if we take it, we will soon forget how important its pollen was for the bees who lived in the garden, and how its fallen petals would feed the worms before the first snow. We will lose the context of the other flowers that were born from it and the streams that turned its yellow leaves a deep verdant green. Not only does picking that flower remove it from the context of the garden, we’re potentially hurting the organisms who grew to rely on it. This is important to remember because when we are digging, we are almost always picking flowers. This is why archaeology is called a destructive science.

Some sites, such as the one I worked at, were at risk of natural destruction. The erosion on the coast was becoming so bad, history was about to be washed out to sea. For the Indigenous populations especially, archaeology can be a way to reclaim the history that was stolen from them. However, in cases like Indigenous archaeology, the garden of our metaphoric flower still exists, so when we take the flower, we have to be careful to remember the context of the garden.

I was very fortunate that the dig I went on was led by an Indigenous archaeologist, who prioritized the preservation of context. Indigenous people still live, and they still try to hold onto their history and culture that was stolen from them by colonists who were driven by antiquarianism and acculturation. As I stuck my hands deep in the dirt, I wasn’t just motivated by the question of what I might find, but also what I might find it with and what that might mean.

The Passamaquoddy tribe is part of the Wabanaki nation. Their territory spans across Eastern Maine and into Canada. The land I was digging on was privately owned by non-tribe members. They opened their land up to the University of Maine when Passamaquoddy artifacts were found on it. The spot sits right next to the ocean and the changing climate has been eroding away history one abnormally high tide at a time.

Many people before me and many people after have been digging at the site. The shell middens left behind by the Indigenous people adjusted the soil's pH, making it easier for the cultural materials to survive Maine’s changing seasons for thousands of years. Previous evidence from the site dates it back to Maine’s earliest ceramic period (around 3,200 years ago), but most of the findings buried in the middens dates somewhere from 1,650 to 800 years ago. This was during Maine’s Ceramic period, which was characterized by—you guessed it—the growing use of ceramic pots.

When I first arrived at the site, it was a misty spring morning. The field team quickly learned the hard way that we would be walking the last few hundred yards, after our van’s wheel sank down to the hubcap in the mud. We hauled buckets, shovels, and giant sieves through the grass to the markers that lined the overlook where we would be digging. Clammers could be seen in the distance, making use of the low tide, while the occasional seal would bounce through the waves. It was a really nice place to make home for four weeks.

Projectile Point in situ

The areas we were to dig in had been predetermined. Throughout the history of the site, archaeologists would establish 1 x 1 meter pits. The land was mapped out on a grid based off North, so that each new group of archaeologists could come in and strategically choose a new spot to dig. Many of these spots would be adjacent to old pits that had produced interesting artifacts in the past.

Once our pits were roped off with string, there was nothing to do but begin digging.

Digging is a slow, methodical process. After breaking the turf with shovels, we switched over to trowels and divided each pit into quadrants. Working in each quadrant, we lowered the soil as evenly as possible a few millimeters at a time. This is because we wanted to be able to find things in situ, or in place, as much as possible. Why does this matter? Context.

If I came across something while digging, I was instructed to leave it in place and clear the space around it before taking pictures and mapping it. I would measure the length of the artifact and its position in the pit, match surrounding soil coloration to an index I had, and draw it as well as any other noticeable artifacts on a sheet of paper. By doing all this paperwork, we’re able to date artifacts in relation to other things that show up. We can understand what about the soil allowed the artifact to be preserved, and if it’s close to anything else, we may be able to piece together things that are not immediately noticeable.

Flakes are one common artifact that we would often find near each other. Flakes are lithics, meaning that they’re made out of rocks. In fact, they’re the leftover pieces when someone is working a rock into a tool in a process called flintknapping. (The man in the video calls flakes “flint chips”). When we find flakes near each other in situ, we can see someone hundreds of years ago creating a tool. One such tool might be something called a scraper, which is a rock shaped to have at least one sharp side. If found near animal bones, we might hypothesize that the scraper was used to help prepare a meal.

Flintknapping also results in the creation of projectile points, also known as arrowheads and spear tips. When I first saw pictures of an arrowhead, I never knew the process involved in making one. While flakes may not be as flashy to look at, they carry an important piece of context. Learning about this process through archaeology helps to carry on the tradition, so we can continue to make tools the way people used to.

Potential Quartz Scraper 2019

Any soil removed from the pit would be put into buckets that we would dump into giant sieves and search through. Small cultural materials that we may miss while digging would be more noticeable on the screen. We would document and bag each individual piece based on what quadrant and level we were digging in. We stopped every 10 centimeters deep to fully document everything, that way we could preserve as much context as possible.

We uncovered many interesting artifacts. In one pit, there were bones of multiple dogs. Others turned up ceramics and potential post molds. I personally uncovered many flakes, scrapers, bones, pieces of brick, and even a couple projectile points.

There’s a video of the field school I was part of on the University of Maine website. I am barely visible in the background, wearing a blue hat at timestamp 0:43. I distinctly remember that I was becoming mortal enemies with a very stubborn tree root that ran through my pit at the time.

Some pits were deeper than others. I don’t remember how deep any of the pits I worked on got, but I remember them being deep enough that I needed to brace myself on the edge to reach the bottom. I remember hearing that we didn’t dig deep enough and the pits might want to be reopened in the future. This was because we didn’t spend every day digging, but more on that in a future blog post…