Digging Up History: Part 2

Petroglyph Depicting a Line of People

This post was originally published June 29, 2023.

Many of the days I spent digging were sunny, summer days. Even after wearing a thick sheen of sunscreen, I still carry new sun freckles on my hands that were left bare for easily wiping soil off artifacts. Some days though, the clouds grew dark and we secured tarps over the pits before the rain started pouring down. On those days, we engaged in other elements of archaeology.

Archaeology just begins in the pits. The artifacts found become cataloged and cleaned, sent to a lab, then maybe a museum. We did some cleaning and cataloging in the shared living space of a college dorm. We double checked our work from the dig site and wrote our findings on paper that wasn’t stained brown from prehistoric soil. When we finished, we packed our things and set out for museums that carried artifacts from other local Indigenous sites.

We visited two museums. The Passamaquoddy Cultural Heritage Museum and the Abbe Museum. We toured the museums on our own then went to the back rooms where we saw the collections that had not made it out on the museum floor. There were at least half a dozen large frames filled with projectile points and flakes from different time periods in the Abbe Museum. I flipped through them like they were giant albums in a record store. The context of pulling similar artifacts out of the ground changed my perspective on them. Alone, they seemed redundant and uninteresting. Once you had seen one, you had seen them all, and sometimes this is true, but when I looked at a large frame filled with flakes, I thought about how good it felt to pull one out of the Earth and hold it in my hand.

Framed Display of Flakes

That is my favorite part of archaeology: I get to make a personal connection with history, some of which isn’t even mine. I remember when I visited Athens, all I wanted to do was touch the temples. I wanted to get some sense of how important these things were. After spending weeks digging up these artifacts, they started to mean something to me. They were more than evidence of something that had happened in the past, they were shaped and handled by humans as they were always meant to be.

During a couple evenings, the field team participated in experimental archaeology. Experimental archaeology is a way to test hypotheses often by attempting to recreate or replicate ancient traditions and activities. Because we were recovering ceramics and stone tools at the dig site, we tried to make our own using the same methods as the Passamaquoddy. Spoiler alert: I was bad at it. I never made ceramics before, and putting oyster shells in the clay for tempering felt like I was cutting my hands up every time I tried to work with it. Flint knapping, on the other hand, I was simply scared of. It didn’t help that right before we got to work hitting rocks with more rocks that we were told a story about someone who had to go to the ER last time they did this. The professor was very supportive though and picked up one of my large flakes, suggesting it could be made into a scraper.

It was pretty obvious that I wasn’t cut out to make the things I was digging up, but the experience helped me develop more of an appreciation for them. Not only could I identify the artifacts easier because I had spent time creating them, I felt a deeper connection to them. Well over a thousand years ago, people were doing exactly what I had been doing and that’s kind of cool. Through experimental archaeology, we can revitalize traditions that—in the case of Indigenous peoples—have been robbed from those who spent their days doing them.

Flint knapping a rock into a series of flakes that could be the basis for a projectile point just like the one I spotted in the soil, which were found just like the dozens of others which filled the frames in the museum’s basement—it was a story unfolding from Maine’s coastal history.

Time, no matter how much we wish it to be, is fleeting. Though archaeology is a destructive science, it’s often paired with words like “preservation” and “recovery.” Sometimes, in the case of the site I was working at, the sea is stealing away the past. But sometimes, it’s people, building their businesses or searching for a cheap trinket for the antique shop. As an archaeologist, I was torn across time, trying to figure out the best way to handle the information that fell victim to it.

Petroglyph Believed to Depict a Person

The last field trip we went on before refilling our pits with the same soil we dug out of them, was to a petroglyph site. The rocks were slick with seaweed and mud, but I tiptoed across them to see the shadows of pictures imprinted on them centuries ago. Petroglyphs are not images that are carved into rocks, but instead, repeatedly pecked into them with a stone chisel and hammerstone. Some were believed to be about 400 years old, as one appeared to depict a ship similar to the ones sailed over from Europe. Others, we have no idea. The Passamaquoddy guide who was pointing them out explained that we don’t know what they mean, but we can do our best to interpret them.

One that withstood the test of time better than others was interpreted as a person. The large triangles adjacent to their heads were hypothesized to be ears and the curved lines near it to be the sharing of sound. Another petroglyph showed what looked like a group of people holding hands.

People have taken pictures of the petroglyphs and through 3D printing technology can recreate them, but the originals will eventually fade away with the tide. Despite the option of physically removing the chunks of imaged rock, the guide explained that letting them disappear would be more appropriate. The Passamaquoddy hold a lot of respect for Mother Nature, and the people who put the petroglyphs on the coastal rocks knew that they would be subject to her. I really admire that decision, and I’m happy that people have honored it. Archaeology is transforming as a science. With the growing importance of context comes the growing importance of cultural respect and ownership.

I was lucky to have a professor, who pressed the importance of engaging with the Passamaquoddy. Over the four weeks, we had visits from speakers, were expected to show young Passamaquoddy students what we were doing with their ancestors’ artifacts, and worked with a tribal leader to find ways to preserve the Passamaquoddy language. The culture that I was unearthing still exists, and many cultures do, though they have morphed and assimilated as necessary over time. When I see these petroglyphs, these arrowheads, and everything involved in making them, I know that they have persevered through time so that we may take a moment to know them, and more importantly, to know the people who held them before us.