ICE AGE ORIGINS: The First Explorers of America
by Dr. Heather M. Rockwell and Dr. Nathaniel R. Kitchel
This article was originally printed in the Spring 2024 issue of The Redwood Library & Atheneum’s print magazine, Etc. To receive future issues of our magazine in the mail, please consider joining the Redwood today.
New Englanders tend to think of this landscape as old. The sturdy stone and wooden buildings feel as though they have been here forever. But this place we call New England did not always look like this. There was a time thousands of years before the colonists arrived when this place was still wild. The last great Ice Age reached its zenith 20,000 years ago. During this time much of North America, from Labrador to Long Island, was buried under two miles of ice. Slowly over the next 8,000 years the ice began to recede, shaping the mountains and valleys we know, yet utterly unrecognizable when compared to the landscape of today. To picture it, one must first try to imagine that all the buildings and roads and trappings of modern life are gone. Then one must imagine the land without most of the trees, a difficult task for many of us who closely associate New England with our forests, and bright fall colors. Much of the Northeast would have been a sparsely forested landscape, with small pockets of spruce and other coniferous trees.
For a time, the land would have been populated by a diverse group of animals, many of which are now extinct. Wooly Mammoths and mastodons, saber toothed cats, lions, horses, beavers the size of cars, and short faced bears, fearsome creatures that were 50% larger than a grizzly, could run forty miles per hour, and are believed to have hunted in packs. We do not know exactly when people first entered this landscape, it is time immemorial, but this new and dangerous land is what the first indigenous people would have encountered. They came here and not only survived in this world, but thrived, exploring every corner of this landscape, and creating communities. This beginning–this initial colonization of North America–has fascinated archaeologists for over a century and is the focus of our current research in the Noreen Stonor Drexel Cultural and Historic Preservation Program.
In many ways our study and understanding of the first people to enter New England, called the Paleoindians, is in its infancy. There are few archaeologists and institutions focusing on the time before European arrival, and even fewer focusing on the earliest period. Fundamental questions about these populations remain unanswered. How did they get here? How did they live? And what did they care about? While all these questions are difficult to answer, the last, what they cared about, is what drew us to research in Maine. In nearly every, very early site we have across New England we find tools made from a beautiful red stone called red Munsungun chert (fig. 1) named after the only geologic formation where this material can be found. If we wish to understand what mattered to people in the past, it makes sense to go to places they frequented. This simple idea began our ongoing project at the Munsungun Quarries of Northern Maine.
The Munsungun Lake formation and the chert (also commonly known as flint) deposits it contains, are in a remote corner of Piscataquis and Aroostook counties called the North Maine Woods. This privately owned, publicly accessible commercial forest is over 3.5 million acres, exceeding in size the largest national park in the lower 48, Yellowstone, by over one million acres. Its landscapes were the focus of Henry David Thoreau’s The Maine Woods, and today it is considered a paradise for hunters, fisherman, and naturalists. It is one of the areas of New England that still feels truly wild, with frequent sightings of moose, bears, foxes, and lynx. Our first journey to the North Maine Woods was in 2011, on what was supposed to be a simple trip to the quarry source of red Munsungun chert. However, we quickly learned that the exact source of this rock had never been found. While black chert was readily available, the red material so prevalent within the earliest sites in the region was nowhere to be found.
Our team spent nearly four years hiking the remote hills of this landscape, finally identifying the red stone quarry in the summer of 2015. The quarry’s face itself is a wall of red rock occasionally striped with black or green, up to three feet tall and hundreds of feet long. Compared to many other chert quarries it is relatively small. It sits high on a steep hill nearly 50 miles from the nearest paved road. Its inaccessible location has protected it as it shows no signs of having ever been disturbed in the modern era. Looking at its face one can still see the strikes of stone hammers slammed on its surface thousands of years ago. With this discovery we could finally pursue our main goal, to discover how this location was used by the first people.
The last great Ice Age reached its zenith 20,000 years ago. During this time much of North America, from Labrador to Long under two miles of Island, was buried under two miles of ice. Slowly over the next 8,000 years the ice began to recede, shaping the mountains and valleys we know, yet utterly unrecognizable when compared to the landscape of today.
Our first field season in 2016 we dug beside the quarry face itself with a small team of volunteers. What we found was mainly the debris from removing stone from the quarry face and some of the initial shaping of stone tools. The excavation units were more artifacts than dirt, giving the ground surface a texture like a railroad. bed. While dense in cultural material these excavations yielded only debris, no tools or projectile points or other materials from which we could understand who was there or when. It appeared that when people used this location they came, they hammered off the rock they needed, and they left. Logical really, as the quarry sits on a high steep ridge, with little space available to make a suitable campsite. To understand the lives of these early groups we needed to find habitation sites, areas where people would have made their home while collecting this rock and crafting their stone tools.
When people think of the prehistoric past they often think of strong, able-bodied, adult men and women, hunting their way across the land. Perhaps true to an extent during the Paleoindian period, as we find many small hunting camps across the landscape that would have been occupied by this small segment of a larger group. These small camps give us only a narrow view of the past, that may not include elders, children, or non-hunting adults. To truly understand human behavior we need larger campsites, what archaeologists call residential sites. Residential sites were likely occupied by extended family groups, children, grandparents, cousins, moving together as a community. Sometimes they might split up, with smaller units fetching resources and returning to the main camp. Occasionally they would join with other family groups in the region, sharing stories, swapping resources, and having fellowship. Finding the site of these sorts of gatherings became our main goal. In 2017, we moved our excavations down the hill from the quarry, focusing on broad flat areas close to a nearby lake. Just a half mile from the quarry face, we identified two prehistoric residential campsites, now dubbed The Stevens Site and the PPE Complex.
Due to the hard work of volunteers over the summers of 2018 and 2019, and more recently our students from Salve Regina University in the summer of 2022 (fig. 2) we have been able to excavate small sections of these camps. The Stevens and PPE Sites tell a story of land use spanning thousands of years. We recovered stone tools which appear to be related to Paleoindian peoples and artifacts which date to just a few thousand years ago, when the beginnings of agriculture were just starting to enter southern New England. With nearly 100,000 stone artifacts it might seem simple to understand how people lived at these sites. However, interpreting human behavior using nothing but chips of stone is a bit like a jig-saw puzzle. One where you do not have a picture to follow on the box, there are no edge pieces, and before you started the puzzle most of the pieces were lost or destroyed. However, with each subsequent field season and the more objects we find, the clearer the picture becomes.
At the Stevens and PPE sites artifacts such as projectile points, scraping tools, wedges called piéce esquillées, and stone knives give a glimpse into the kinds of activities undertaken at these sites. We can imagine a group of hunters returning with a deer or caribou, they successfully dispatched using a stone tipped spear. They would use stone knives to butcher the animal and pièce esquillées to split the bones and extract the nutritious marrow. Others from the group may have spent their day making tools to replace those lost or broken during the hunt, massive piles of chipping debris would have been produced to shape new stone spear points. The scraping tools (fig. 3) may have been used to carve a new spear shaft from a tree branch. or to clean the hides of the animal killed to make into clothing. Still others likely would have spent the day entertaining children, taking them to help gather wild plants and teaching them how to create their own stone tools. At night they would gather around a fire, remnants of which were found within the Stevens site in the form of stained earth and bits of charcoal, We know that the people living at these sites traveled great distances across New England and into Canada. We have multiple artifacts made of Kineo Traveler Rhyolite (fig.4), distinctive due to its bright white color, the source of which is located far to the south of the site. Even more intriguing is a single piece of a delicate pinkish stone (fig.5), believed to have come from as far away as the Minas Basin of Nova Scotia over 300 miles to the east. These materials were likely collected directly by the inhabitants of the Stevens and PPE sites, as few trade networks are well established at this time.
What does this all mean for our understanding of the first people in the region? It means that they knew this landscape well, they had already identified many remote resources over hundreds of miles by the time they reached the Munsungun Quarry. The massive quantities of material found at our sites suggest that this location was valuable, having both adequate food and material resources to support communities for an extended period. This may mean that this spot was once used to gather multiple families to celebrate and have community. Importantly this site was one for teaching. We can see that some of the artifacts left here show a high degree of skill and expertise in their creation, while others appear less well made, perhaps the product of a novice. It is likely that this spot would have served as a training ground, one where you have plenty of stone to practice on, making many mistakes and learning from elders along the way. Just as we are using the Munsungun project to teach our students how to properly excavate a site, people in the past were using this location to teach their children how to make the tools they needed to survive.
The work we have undertaken at the Munsungun quarries project is important to our understanding of the cultural values of these early people. But we still have a long way to go and a lot more digging to do. Accompanied by a dozen Salve students we will be continuing our excavations this summer and learning from traditional knowledge holders from the Aroostook band of Mi’kmaq. We hope that our work will continue to reveal the lives of these first indigenous people. This founding population faced incredible challenges, traveled immense distances, and created a rich culture and community in this new and wild land.
Dr. Heather M. Rockwell is Assistant Professor of Cultural and Historic Preservation at Salve Regina University. Dr. Heather Rockwell is an anthropological archaeologist in the Noreen Stonor Drexel Cultural and Historic Preservation Program in the Department of Cultural, Environmental, and Global Studies at Salve Regina University. Her areas of expertise include hunter-gatherer studies, colonization of the Americas, and historic preservation law and practice.
Dr. Nathaniel R. Kitchel is Assistant Professor of Cultural and Historic Preservation at Salve Regina University and a specialist in the material culture of early America in the Northeast.
