 And I want to welcome you all to the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum third Sunday lecture, which we try to put on every month thanks to John Devineau, who is actually taking a tour up to the house right now, so he will be back. But anyway, that's what we do, and we welcome you. And so glad to see you, and so glad to be part of the archeology lecture series this year. And so very special to have Jess here with us today. Jess is Vermont State Archeologist. He works within the Division for Historic Preservation in Montpelier. He's a native Burlingtonian. Jess received his BA in Anthropology and English from the University of Vermont in 1999. I always eat up the numbers here. I think someone took that from the bio. His MA in Literature from the University of Kent in 2001. His MA in Anthropology from the University of Albany, SUNY in 2008. And his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Albany, SUNY in 2015. During much of that time, Jess was also a research supervisor at the University of Vermont Consulting Archeology Program, so quite a lot of good academics here. As the state archeologist, Jess is centrally concerned with the stewardship, preservation, and interpretation of Vermont's rich archeology, archeological path. His own research explores issues surrounding Native American long-distance material exchange, ritual elaboration, and social crises, as these phenomena are evidence in the Northeastern archeological record. He has authored or co-authored a number of journal articles, book chapters, conference papers, and technical reports about these and other topics. So let's all welcome Jess here today. Thanks, all. I really appreciated I had little doubt that there would be this many, or a little hope that there would be this many people on such a gorgeous late summer day. But thank you all very much for coming. I am the state archeologist with the Division for Historic Preservation. And combined with my colleagues at the Agency of Transportation every year, we sponsor a month-long program of events, workshops, lectures, and other events called Vermont Archeology Month. And this is one of those events. And so thank you all for participating in this and for helping it to make such a great month. One of my former coordinators is sitting way in the back, Emily Crian. And we've made great strides over the years, thanks in part to her. The other coordinators, this year's coordinator, Brett Ostrom, and I want to give all the credit to them as well. So I was here in March, and I gave somewhat of a general overview of Vermont Archeology, concentrating a little bit on Chittenden County, but doing the broad strokes through time and technology. And I was asked back to coincide with Vermont Archeology Month, and I said, well, okay, let's make it a little more specific this time relative to the Burlington Interveil where the Ethan Allen Homestead is, where so much is known, or at least thought to be known about archeology in the region. Certainly some of our most important archeological sites that we hang our hat on in this region were known from the Interveil. But I have to say in preparing this talk, not only did I find it difficult to get around the nuances of this area, but also how to interpret that for this audience. And so it's a lesson to me and also hopefully a work in progress. And one of the things I will note at the outset is there's a remarkable wealth of information about the environment, about the hydrology, the forest communities, the wetlands, the indigenous species, and there is a lacuna in tying that back to the ancient past in archeology. So this talk has sort of reinvigorated for me a long-term project to synthesize this data about the ancient past to inform all of that and make it better for all of us. So with that, we'll just get going with Lisa Brooks. So I just noticed her book is in the book room and I might very well buy it at the conclusion of this talk. And she summarizes what a Wolonak or Interveil in Abnaki is, the fertile bulls between mountain ranges that were capable of sustaining many families who gathered their forming permanent communities. In Interveil is an old term that's somewhat been superseded by other terms and yet we still use it intermittently here in Vermont and you can find them on old maps. Again, talking into these valleys between mountains. The Interveil itself is relatively recent geologically and hydrologically, 12,000 or 13,000 years ago to after 10,000 years ago, the Champlain Sea overlaid what is now much of the Champlain Lowland including the Interveil area up to a certain stretch anyway. And after it receded and during the process of the Champlain Sea's recession, the Winooski Delta was built out through all the outwash of sediment left over by the glaciers and ground out from the mountains and other areas. So the Winooski Delta is actually very recent within the last 10,000 years or so and was a build out of all of this sediment washing in from interior margins and left over from the Champlain Sea. The Winooski River itself whose abnaki name resides at the top of Nostakak or Onion River. Although as it flows through the Delta, it's quite recent. It is a very ancient river that predates at least the last several glaciers and ran through the mountains at a very distant time period. So it is a very old river although the stretch here on the Interveil is quite recent, at least in its current iteration. The next few slides I've borrowed from the Lake Champlain Basin program and their various reports, they do remarkable jobs with graphics and I couldn't regenerate it better if I tried so I'm borrowing them. But here what we have and you can see it's cut off a little bit at the bottom but here what we have is the extent of the Lake Champlain Basin watershed. It is absolutely enormous compared to most equivalent lakes and in fact you can see here this, oh it's cut off but you can see here that over 90% of the water that flows that comprises Lake Champlain flows from surrounding watersheds or sub basins and that the watershed ratio of lake to watershed is 18 to one whereas the Great Lakes is two to one. So we have 18 times as much water or actually nine times as much water flowing into Lake Champlain from surrounding basins than a typical lake like the Great Lakes would have. This obviously has implications in the modern area for phosphorus load and other things because such a vast array of streams and feeder streams, tributaries and major rivers feed into Lake Champlain. But it also meant in the Native American and early historic past that all of these various and quite extensive systems were tied back into this central place, the Lake Champlain. You could always follow many of these rivers back and get to the lake or streams. And in particular here is the Winooski River watershed, a very large watershed within the Lake Champlain Basin system. Just zooming in a little bit further, six major rivers and tributaries feed the Winooski. Just to zoom in here. Again, an extensive system and all of those eventually passed through this intervail region on its way out to the lake. So we are at the base of this system. Now, in preparation for this talk, I grabbed our recently generated lidar of a portion of the intervail here. It's a little bit difficult to see in this light and I do apologize because a couple tiles came in and I need to talk to the Vermont Center for Geographic Information about this where they store and make available for free all of this data. But certain tiles came in with tree cover here and then certain tiles without and I got them from the same store. So I'm not sure what's up. But in any case, I thought I would leave it in rather than bending over backwards so you can get a comparison of what it's like when you have lidar which picks up the tree cover and if you zoomed in, you could get even individual trees. Again, lidar stands for laser light ranging and detection. It is flown from a plane and shoots lasers to the ground at roughly half a million times a second. And those bounce back or a large percentage of them bounce back. They calculate the time and the distance between the bounce back and they're able to then much like radar or sonar get a map of the topography. But what is wonderful about lidar over and above its accuracy which is generally less than a meter from a plane is that enough of those pulses get down to the forest floor even through the trees that then in post-processing you can say, well, these aren't the ground. These are trees, these dots and factor them out essentially removing the tree cover of any given area. So this is a boon for archeologists because it's essentially electronically or through software removing the forest to see what the bare earth is like. And so in one of the derived products is often called bare earth lidar. So here you can see these tiles where all the tree cover and vegetation is removed. And we'll be returning to these slides throughout the talk but I do wanna draw your attention to here's the Ethan Allen homestead area but all these relic oxbows coming through showing the dynamism of the Winooski River through time. Again, below the falls, it picks up some speed and certainly picks up volume as it flows out toward the lake. Just another image of the Winooski River intervail area. And I have to give credit to both Pete Thomas, the old director of the UVM consulting archeology program who did these original maps in the 1980s and then John Croc for digitizing them and loaning them to me for the purpose of this talk. But to show the vast meanderings of the Winooski River in the intervail area through time, the blue is the modern day or within the past 10 years or so river. The brown is the 1802 trajectory of the Winooski River. 1830, 1869, 1894, and then these are all overlaid. And you can see the vast movement of the river in only roughly 200, 180 years. Now, archeologically, and we'll show this, we have seen this through time going back at least three, 4,000 years. But it is quite clear that in the modern era or in the historic era, that this has increased the sediment loads and the meandering and dynamism of the river have increased markedly. One notable thing was out at the Howe Farm on North Ave, a component of this intervail system. When the Northern connector was built, they borrowed a load of sediment out of one area to make the road, which formed a sort of pond, but it was essentially dead because not knowing anything at the time about wetland or water body regeneration, the sides were too steep and so no vegetation could really catch hold and reform a functioning wetland system. So the EPA and the Army Corps in the early 2000s decided that they needed to taper the sides more of this pond in order to regenerate vibrant wetland communities, but because they were gonna potentially impact the impact archeological resources, UVM, of which I was a part at the time, went out to do some soil profiles to see what it was like. So here you can see this is roughly five feet down. We're cleaning the profile walls to try to get the mapping of sediment through time, trying to find archeological sites, but at the end, what we saw is this series of flood zones, major floods. You can see separated through time and space, and though you can't see the words down there, at the very bottom of this, we radiocarbonated a log to 1880. So all of this sediment is post-1880. So massive, massive flood sediment deposition. And why was this? And here's just another map from the fluvial study from the intervail area, and all of these arrows indicate pre-1900 oxbow systems. So this is a massive movement of the river. The blues are between 1802 and 1857. The reds are between, I can't tell, but sometime after that. And then the greens are oxbows abandoned prior to 1802. And you can see these are probably quite ancient, but all the vast movement since that time. And why was this? Well, certainly there's a variety of factors, but probably the biggest one is forest clear-cutting for habitation and settlement. This is just a diorama from the Harvard Forest, which doesn't depict Vermont, but does depict a typical New England scene of minor woodlots, but otherwise denuded hillscapes with bounded hills and hill farmers planting plots. This, though, is from Underhill. And again, I have to give credit to John Croc who alerted me to this yesterday when I was at another Vermont Archaeology Month event. And this is an early single room schoolhouse in Underhill, but note the totally denuded hillside all the way in the back right down to Scrubland. And this would have fed eventually through the dog into the Winooski. If you just imagine the sediment load. And I forgot to ask Kate Kenney from the University of Vermont Consulting Archaeology Program about this yesterday, but I do remember her doing some research on the early residents of the Burlington area and talking about how the 1830 flood, which was probably worse than the 1927 flood, except had much less human impact because there were so much fewer people living in here. But she recalled seeing a newspaper article where they thought that it was the end of the world on the intervail because the entire thing was essentially drowned and Burlington on the hill was essentially an island. So remarkable. And then again, more recently in Hurricane Irene, you can say here's the community farm. So clearly we have a dynamic river system here near the mouth toward Lake Champlain. And the dynamism can be certainly destructive as you probably all know here, but also enabled vast fertility, particularly when these flood episodes were somewhat arrested or made farther apart in time or less severe due to forest cover. And just to give you now situate you in the native past, here's a map of sort of the tribes at the time of early European contact and their rough approximate boundaries. And here we have the Western Abnaki right here located in this region. And again, returning to the intervail area, remarkable place, not just for its fertility, soil fertility, which we'll talk about in a minute, but the host of species that were able to come down here. And I saw the diorama as we walk in showing some really great variety. But one of the most biologically diverse areas in the state with many recorded species of mammals, waterfowl, fauna, other fauna, amphibians, foodstuffs, edible plants, non-edible plants and just some of these areas here, this cute little beaver. Extremely important for, as both a food source, but more prominently for food and for tools. Beaver teeth were extremely important tools for woodworking and other things. I'll forget this caribou down here, I forgot to take him out. But obviously moose and deer, extremely important. Salmon, where the salmon hole gets its name, this would have been an important fishery in time prior to damming and hydrologic change. And then waterfowl, extremely important in seasons for food and for false storage. And then this is an inset zoomed in from Champlain's 1612 map of North America as then known, particularly New France. And you can see here a Jerusalem artichoke that my colleague Fred Wiseman pointed out in an earlier publication. Onions here and a variety of other species, including bean, that would have been procured by Native Americans again. And Champlain, as he came into Lake Champlain region in 1609, remarking that the rivers had were productive and grained, such as I had eaten in this country together with many kinds of fruit without limit. And just parenthetically, I found this right online. And for those of you who are scholars of the intervail, it's Catherine Blofson, she wrote a master's thesis called Intervail Out Loud, a place-based oral history project. And I thought it was really great and certainly does a great job of synthesizing a lot of oral history about the intervail area. So I've never met her, I don't know her, but I found it online and it was a great document. You all are probably familiar with this quotation, but for those of you aren't, I will read it out. I explored the intervails below the falls of said Onion River and pitched my tent by a large pitch pine tree nearly opposite to an island, about one and a half miles below the falls, where I'd observed large intervails on both sides of the river and landed for the first time I ever set foot on the fertile soil of the Onion River at the lower end of the meadow, now known by the name of the old fields, where I discovered from my boat and opening like cleared lands. I went up the open meadow where the blue joint grass was thick till in sight of a large and lonely elm, computing the open fields at 50 acres. I was much pleased with this excursion, promising myself one day to be the owner of that beautiful meadow. And he did. The Allens were quite known for this. But what's notable is he talks about cleared lands of at least 50 acres and subsequent generations of scholars now known that that was not natural clearing, that was Native American clearing for agriculture. And indeed one series of quotations that you might not be familiar with, I certainly found it sort of by happenstance last year was written by Daniel Charles Sanders, the first president of the University of Vermont in 1828. He wrote this after he had retired, called The History of the Indian Wars, which is one of these early sort of treatises that tries to synthesize every battle across North America. But because he was situated in Vermont, one chapter was devoted to Native American studies in Vermont and he has these particular insights about Winooski in 1828 or thereabouts. Indian cornfields are plainly to be seen in various parts of Vermont. At the intervals in Burlington, several hundred acres together were found by the American settlers entirely cleared, not a tree upon them. The lands perfectly leveled the soil made by vernal freshets and then which there can be no richer land. And then on the Onion River, this is more notable archeologically, if somewhat more tragic. On the Onion River opposite Burlington, the bank washed away by the water, discovered a vast quantity of bones of various sorts and sizes for more than 10 rods in extent. The horns of deer were yet distinguishable and digging a few feet among several things found was the edge part of an Indian iron hatchet which had been cracked and broken off at the eye. From the whole scene throughout, the thought hurried itself into mind that this was a burying ground for the natives at a time when it was customary to bury provisions for the nourishment and instruments for defense with the bodies of the deceased when they made their journey to the country of the souls. Now, that was a common and stereotypical and somewhat simplistic summary of their belief systems but nevertheless quite remarkable that an enormous Native American cemetery it had this time in the 1820s likely washed into the river and that the iron implements mean it was quite recent in time from probably the 1700s by the time or maybe late 1600s by the time those trade goods got into this region. Again, a cautionary tale for archeologists here about the resources that may yet still be here but also about the erosion that was already being caused at this time and Native Americans didn't haphazardly despite what many stereotypically said they wouldn't bury their dead in spots prone under normal conditions to immediate erosion. Rather, this was probably a new phenomenon that went on. And probably one of the most important reasons for the intervail for Native Americans the abnacchi in this region was the growing of corn and beans and squash. An early plate by DeVry. This is by John White and then more locally the abnacchi folks. And a last thing about the general features of the Winooski is that it was a primary artery of transportation and travel. You know, as I believe I said in the last talk for those of you who are here the rivers were Native Americans natural highways. They cut through what was otherwise an often rugged and forested land and this would have been the equivalent of a super highway. With notable portages at the falls and other places this would have been a broad wide river with which to make journeys quite quickly out into the lake and then up into the hinterlands. And we'll talk about some of this. Early archeologists noted in and around the intervail things like Native American, or not early archeologists, early settlers and others saw things like Native American pottery in and around this region. But there was a very, very incomplete understanding almost complete lack of understanding about how recently the Native Americans had occupied the intervail prior to the Allens and the early settlers. So with that as background I'd like to talk about some particular sites in this area. Again, looking at this lidar the red and multicolored areas get increasingly high in elevation and you can see the bottom land almost uniformly at 105, 108 feet just slightly above the Winooski River itself. And here are all of the archeological sites we have documented in the intervail right now. There are many other archeological collections that have been sort of, we've been alerted to but don't have a precise provenience or location for them. So while we know that a lot of people have found artifacts here in the past if we can't tie them to a specific location we can only say that they're from this general area. And this area was prior to my time but in the mid 2000s designated one of the few archeological districts in Vermont meaning that it has a special significance and that the sites themselves tell a cohesive story over and above the individual sites but that they are somewhat related in space and in time. And the black here which is sort of tough to see is the boundaries of the district. So starting at the archeological beginning so to speak one of the first or the first really serious documentation of the archeological richness of the intervail was done by my mentor and friend Jim Peterson in the late 1970s as part of his PhD work or work for the Vermont Archeological Society and UVM which eventually became his PhD. On the Winooski side of the river here at VTCH 46 otherwise known as the Winooski site. Just another view here. Here's the used to be the carpet factory then became various other things most recently was DR Trimmermauer but I've recently heard that they're gonna be closing that operation unfortunately. And then all of this area here essentially and if you go back you can really see the, well maybe you can't but you can see how, you can see how this is bounded. This is artificial. This is the rail trestle and system but how this is bounded by this higher terrain. So before there was a carpet factory there this had long been known informally as a place where people would stumble upon artifacts when walking along the river or fishing and Jim and the Vermont Archeological Society and UVM did a joint excavation in the mid to late 70s where they really uncovered a vast rich Native American presence here primarily dating to the middle to late woodland. So between about 2000 years ago to the time of European contact with the majority of the occupations here being the middle woodland from about for the purposes of this discussion about 2000 years ago to about 1000 years ago. Here's some just interesting slides we recently scanned and a problem that we're facing just parenthetically is that this was pre-digital obviously and many of the slides from these early excavations are rapidly fading and yellowing and so I'm trying to get some interns to come in and scan them before they're unrecognizable and you'll see some of those in a minute. You can see here somewhat difficult but all of these rocks here are a vast roasting pit and you can see all the flood sediments above. A post from an old structure right here. People returned in 1995 for a field school here and again in different part here's the berm to the trestle right there. I don't know why we were taking black and white in 1995 but oh well. And just remarkable things came out. Again floodplains archeologically are very important because a Native American group will come stay at a particular site, camp, live and eventually they will leave and then at a certain later time the river will flood, deposit a layer of sterile sediment over that then another Native American group will come later and so through the millennia you get this layer cake like thing where they're all separated in time and you can see how things have changed and that is really what was here in evidence at the Winooski site and some of the others I'll be showing it in a minute. A vast amount of Native American pottery came out from this excavation and in fact enabled Jim to formulate a series of decorative changes through time that we still use today and finally published with a lot of reference to other sites in 1991 which is the system we all Northeastern archeologists utilized today and came from these early excavations on the Winooski site. These whole pots with these beautiful what we call drag stamp or taking a tooth tool and going like this at an angle throughout to make these remarkable decorative motifs, notched rims and again what he derived from this the early woodland only fabric paddling or taking the edge of the fabric wrapped dowel and pressing it into the pot. We think as archeologists that this might have had a decorative significance but was more likely to drive air bubbles out of the pottery so that it wouldn't explode in an open firing but then quickly going into a variety of decorative motifs through time including cord wrap stick which is a very uninventive name for a cord wrap stick rocker dentate where you would take a tooth tool but you would rock it on a Z thing like this and then pseudo scallop which is a very interesting horizon beginning around 2100 years ago and continuing to about 1700, 1600 years ago where on the coast they would take the edge of a scallop shell which had this wavy line and use that to decorate pots but it was such a compelling design motif that people in the interior here would remake it likely out of wood or even perhaps trade scallop shells into the interior to recreate these pots. Spear points gating from the Middle Woodland or again around this 1600, 1700 year time period and then later these triangles which can note a strict shift to bow and arrow technology beginning around 1000 AD made out of local court site and again just a Native American timeline here showing where this span was. They did find some evidence of what we call late archaic or around 3000 to 4000 year old fire pits deep down but they were very ephemeral in light nothing like the massive amount of occupation that was evidenced during this woodland period from 3000 years ago on and particularly from about 2000 years ago on. One of the most remarkable things about the Winooski site was their variety of floral food remains they were able to analyze. So foods, butternut, black walnut, hickory, oak, hazelnut, lamb's quarters or pigweed, fire cherry, blackberry or raspberry, staghorn sumac, hog peanuts, snowberry, buckwheat and then a variety of other medicinal uses and then dyes. Showing not only giving us an insight into what Native Americans utilize but also the richness of the intervail area itself and a public outreach document was published out of that which is now available online. I recently scanned it and even though it's somewhat dated I thought it should still be, it still stands as an important document. Moving on, how are we doing? All right. We'll move over to the Ethan Allen homestead area itself. Shortly thereafter, a number of things began to be proposed for the intervail, both to try to assess the hydrological dynamism and other things, improvements some related to the connector, others just with the increased pace of development. So here we have here the homestead itself which is an archeological site designated VTCH 136 in our inventory or the 136 site in Chittenden County for which we have documentation. We knew about this before but for some reason this got listed before which is VTCH 96 and in the lidar you can really see what an interesting landform this is coming out under these lower, often inundated low-lying fields and just above it we have this neat little peninsula where the Native Americans would have been somewhat drier but had immediate access to probably their corn fields out here and how do we know that? Oh yeah, don't wanna give short shrift. I just grabbed one slide from this but various archeological excavations that have been done here found a variety of somewhat mixed not altogether full of integrity historic artifacts and some Native American artifacts on the site through time but then VTCH 94, the corn cob site, otherwise known as the, that's sorry, that's 96 but anyway. Again, dug in 1979, you can see a very deep feature here with some fire cracked rock, other, the remains of fire hearths here. Interesting suite of stone tools but more interesting is the pottery that came out that has a variety of decorative motifs but the fire hearths are what were potentially most interesting about this because in this particular one, this subtle basin-shaped remains of a fire pit, they found what so far has been the only intact corn cob on the intervail from the pre-contact era dated to about 1400 A.D. But likewise, they found at this general site area butternuts that also date to roughly the same time period indicating to Pamela Bumsted and Pete Thomas who published this and which I just revisited last night that they weren't fully invested in agriculture to the exclusion of other things like many other Native American groups were by this time but were still had a robust collecting strategy where they were going out and getting butternuts collecting things and then probably augmenting them with maize so not fully invested in this agricultural lifestyle. We have to investigate this more but it seems likely and then also an ephemeral fire pit that they dated to almost 3,000 years ago showing the use of this landform through the Woodland period and again, that's where this site was. Sure, why it's not advancing, but. Any idea? Battery maybe did? Oh, did I turn it off? That's a total possibility. Well, can someone advance my slide? Good. Yeah, I'm still dead here so might have to just ask. All right, great. Moving into the central portion of the intervail if we just wanna advance forward. You can see this really interesting, I mean just to give you an idea of the lidar and how detailed it is, you can see the individual furrows from the plowing and you can see this very dynamic oxbow system here and again in 1979, Pete Thomas came out as part of the newly formed UVM consulting archeology program to do some survey and these were the deepest excavations that have been done on the intervail thus far. Next slide please. So, we're gonna start up there at VTCH 146. Next slide please. Otherwise known as the McNeil Barrow site. Here's a map of what the excavations were like and these are not typical in Vermont. They knew the soils were so deep that they did a bunch of backhoe trenches and then augmented that with augers and I mentioned this only because I'm kind of proud of myself because a couple days ago, my colleague Scott who worked on this in the late 1970s said, you know, I would love to be able to relocate where those pits were but it's so hard because our permanent datum was the fire tower which is gone now and all this stuff and I said, oh, I think I can do it. So, next slide. I matched up these old oxbow systems and then and re-put them with the lidar with this really remarkable spatial control I have. I was able to match it up and then next slide, next slide, then map because I had that map georeference then put up where the test pits were. So now, now he's all excited. Now he's like, well, maybe we go out and do something now. So, so stay tuned. Next slide. So remarkable depth to the floodplain deposits here. I couldn't find a picture but there is a famous picture of Pete Thomas, a young Pete Thomas way at the bottom of this that would never pass Osha muster now. I mean, it is like so dangerous and he's just sitting on the bottom traveling away but I'll show a few sides of this. Next slide. How deeply they go and it's a little bit hazy here. Oh, hey, did it come back? It's a little bit hazy here but you can see these just lenses of flood deposits just going back in time over thousands of years. Well, I still have this but for some reason this isn't working. Oh, well, anyway. So very, very deep about 15, 16 feet down and a closer view. Next slide. And within this, intermittently and not large because the testing was so broad that they weren't really able to hone in or in particular areas of Native American habitation and sort of do a decreased sampling. This was just a broad survey. So it was wherever they happen to find stuff and yet they found quite a bit of stuff continuing on. This is a diagram of all the various flood deposits and you can see that many of them were in an old channel. You saw the dynamism here and that's why they're lift up near the end. Next slide. Kind of tough to see but the remains of fire pits here. Next slide. And notably at three meters down you can see three meters or two and a half meters down so roughly seven. They came upon a human cremation dated to around 3,600 years ago. Next slide. I won't show the images themselves. Oh, wait. Here's some of the few artifacts, scrapers. One of these Lovanna or Triangle spear points that dates to about 1,000 years ago near a fire hearth dating to that time period. Small numbers of Native American pottery that we can date through stylistic motifs through this 2,000 year period. Next slide. And then I won't show the human remains themselves but a diagram of the calcine bone related to a human cremation. Next slide. And the parts that they were able to recognize. Next slide. Next slide. So from that really remarkable insight we could say that virtually the entire intervail out there even as dynamic as it was and certainly some areas were clearly destroyed by recent alluvium. You saw that but other areas remain intact particularly for this late woodland period. Later on Vermont gas systems wanted to run some propane lines so they did some other trenching. Next slide. Again, large trenches run through and we took this opportunity to look at all of the flood plain stratigraphy varied but showing various lenses of dark material that show stable surfaces and may indicate that Native Americans were living on those surfaces through time. Did find some artifacts in various places too. Next slide. Next slide. Just showing people working in the late 70s. You can see the McNeil plant in the back. Next slide. Various Native American fire hearths again. Next slide. And then we move on to the McNeil site itself. The McNeil generating plant was an early site again that was done by the University of Vermont Consulting Archaeology Program. Next slide. Down in this area. Again, just on the other side of the river from the famous Winooski site. Next slide. And again, just showing the topography but once you get back near the McNeil plant there's still flood episodes but there are probably what would be the equivalent of 1,000 year floods. Many of them didn't quite get to cover over that area with such depth. It's a little bit higher up if any of you have ever been out there. And it probably just got the most severe flooding. So there was some flood separation but not like way out on the interval. Next slide. And again, close up of this area. Obviously quite disturbed due to the building of the generating plant and a lot of the farm and industry that was going on down in this particular location from the early 1800s on. Next slide. But there was some work done at the McNeil plant and around it in the 1980s. Next slide. Next slide. Just showing what it looked like in the early 80s. Next slide. I tried to find a picture just of the landfill when it was open on the internet. I couldn't find one. I guess there's a collective forgetting but I remember going on the belt line when I was a kid and seeing it right out there and the tractors driving all over it and the seagulls everywhere and you know, it's remarkable. I was just driving here today and it's all treat now. I mean, it's just, it's really remarkable. But oh well. And again, a series of fire hearts and other things many of which contained butternut. None of which were contained maize in these but again to the same time period continuing on and continuing. And some of the things again are remarkably similar suite of tools from the other side of the river and from farther out. These Jacksreef corner notch, middle woodland spear points again made out of local materials. Next slide. And then some later triangles from the late woodland made out of quartzite. Next slide. And then a wide variety of pottery showing a variety of decorative motifs. Next slide. More recently, just some supplemental work back in the area of early digital. You can see people out there. Next slide. And then we thought that we knew the limits of the McNeill site but when there was gonna be some work done at the intervail, there was some archeology again done by the University of Vermont consulting archeology program. They were gonna do various things like, next slide. Move the calcans barn over or move the barn over and do other various improvements. And so an archeological investigation was undertaken around that area to see what might be found. And largely in the supplemental area over here, a lot of Native American artifacts were found but they were sort of displaced, interspersed with historic things indicating that it was once much like the rest of the McNeill plant area very heavily occupied by Native Americans but not a lot of integrity left, continue on. Just an overview of aerials to show the change through time. This is pre-plant, 1937 aerial, a rare early area of this area. This is 1962. Next. And it's a close up of the 1962. This again is 1999 and by that time the intervail center's there. Next. Yep. Yep, all right. And then post 2000. Again, a zooming interview. Next slide. And again, various changes that have happened since 1962 and 2004. And next slide. So as part of these changes, UVM did some work on the intervail center side of the road and while they did find some disturbance, they actually found, next slide. Next slide. That in many areas there was modern fill probably to level the area out. That's this sort of light stuff here but underneath there was still intact soil deposits, many of which contained Native American artifacts particularly pottery. And John Crock and UVM Anthropology Department and subsequently did a field school down here, recovered many more remains. Next slide. And again, that's very clear here. You can see that sort of fill or flood packet but below which there were intact artifacts. Next slide. And then particularly this area right by the river which was a berm made for this pond but underneath the berm there was still intact Native American deposits. And then other work for hoop houses again, just getting these little windows into the deep flood stratigraphy that we've documented various placements around the intervail. Next slide. Next slide. Next slide. And I don't wanna forget the historic resources in the intervail. Many of you have probably seen this work by Britta, recently done for the intervail center just documenting the Calcans farmstead here and I can read it a classic example of an Italian eight style architecture. The farmhouse was built in 1868 for George Reynolds and occupied by his family through 1907. Various tenant farmers lived on the property and operated the dairy until 1937 when Ella Calcans moved to the farm alone and took it over. Her daughter, Rina joined her in 1941 and continued living in the farmhouse and operating the farm until 1991. The house is a classic example of an Italian eight style farmhouse with a high degree of historic integrity. Exterior features such as the decorative window moldings, porches with elaborate carvings, double entry door and slate roof or characteristic defining features of the Italian eight style. And again, credit to Britta who did a remarkable sort of flyer for the intervail foundation or the intervail center and I think you can get it online, really great. And so yes, it wasn't operating farm but as many of you know, the intervail after the sort of agricultural boom in the 1970s fell into some disrepair. It was used as a dump. It was, and then it had a formal landfill there but it's really seen a resurgence in recent years and is used for probably the purpose that it was used for millennia now largely which is agriculture. Although, you know, as others have noted particularly that master student Catherine Blofson, many people more recently are weighing the benefits and detriments of the vast floods that have, you know, make it a gamble to farm out there. The soil is very fertile but the danger of losing your crop is significant. I just want to end with saying that the intervail wasn't certainly the only area that was popular for Native Americans particularly in this later phase, this woodland period. Farther up, you can recognize the airport here. In the back road, National Guard Road, they were, well they have now expanded the National Guard, Air National Guard Center. But prior to doing that, several consultants ending up with the University of Vermont Consulting Archeology Program that did the detailed phase three work. Documented, next slide. A major, what was determined to be Native American Village, dating to, for those of you here before, I think I mentioned this site because it is remarkable, there were six, five or six radiocarbon dates run on various things. Two on maize or corn that was discovered at this site in a fire pit and in a storage pit. Two on butternut, again this interesting mix of naturally harvested nut trees and then maize augmenting and one on hot porn beam, a wood species. And all of them came out to the exact same radiocarbon date. I've never had that happen in Vermont. Normally they're all over the place and then you gotta bend your mind around what's wrong. But they all came out to 1315 AD after the calibration. And extents, we'll go through some of these slides here. Next slide. The two major blocks were done on either side of this sort of swale and we hypothesized that the base of the swale actually was a spring that's been infilled. And so once it would have probably been a village that was arrayed around this spring in the middle. Next slide. You can see here again, the radiocarbon dates, all showing and the blues are positive test pits that had Native American artifacts. There's very few reds and you can see we only excavated where they were gonna put the road. So the rest is still preserved and locked safe away behind the National Guard fences. But we only saw very little of a massive, probably Native American village. Next slide. Just showing the, this is non-depositional now so we're up off the floodplain. Next slide. But that black is all a living surface. Basically, soil made organically rich by just people living on it for so long. And then interspersed in that, a series of features, storage pits, fire hearts. Next slide, which you can see here. Next slide. And then, as archeologists do, we took every little piece of lithic debotage and mapped it to 50 by 50 centimeter squares in a particular 10 centimeter depth and put them all into an Excel spreadsheet and then ran these contour analysis to see where the densest things are. And you can see this clear density and then the blues are the two north and south are fire pits. The center in the middle is a fire pit and then there's various refutes and storage pits around it. Here's a very characteristic late woodland bell shaped jar, I mean bell shaped pit for storing corn. But completely empty, indicating that they ate all the corn and took it out. And what's left is just the remnant. Next slide. And just showing some other detailed in the other block detailed heat maps. And then where we found all the late woodland arrowhead, lavana, arrowheads. Next slide. And again, a close up view. Next slide. And then where we found all the lavana projectile points. Here are hundreds of them. This is a remarkable. Next slide. And then what we hypothesized from all that mapping is that we identified probably a portion of one Native American elongated house. I hesitate to use the formal term long house, which is much more Iroquoian. But an elongated house, much of which was on one end was disturbed by National Guard Road. Yep. And then a series of other late woodland sites around this area as well. So not just the intervail, but another node further up the Winooski River that shows intensive late woodland occupation through time. But what was notable about National Guard Road is it was off the flood plain. It was nestled into sort of a knoll. All of the wood that we found there with the very few exceptions like that Hop Horned Bean was jack pine, which now there's less than 500 acres in Chittenden County but was once a major forest type encompassing something like 20,000 square acres. And it seems like they might have burned it down to form the village. And they probably kept up there in the winter, nestled from the winds, but still in close proximity to the Winooski River itself, able to access their stores. So rounding out the seasonal movement. And then finally, I'll just go through this very quickly because I know I'm almost out of time, continue. Camp Johnson showing another view on a tributary of the Winooski interior. You can see it there. Next slide. Showing the other extent, these logistical hunting forays by probably a few Native American hunters into the woods. We strongly suggest or think that this was a deer yard. A very small just sort of fire pit, you know, roughly about this thing. And surrounding it was we tested many, many test pits and didn't find a thing. And then we got to this one. Next slide. And next slide. And we found all of these spear points and the remains of the legs of a deer. And radio carbon dated plant foods. And so we get this remarkable picture of what looks like a couple hunters going out, you know, capturing a deer, eating the legs because those were probably the part that they could, you know, feast on without, you know, destroying the whole meal and then probably being in the rest of the carcass back for food in the fall or winter. So we get this whole seasonal round. And when we begin to synthesize all of these archeological sites, not just these concentrations on the Irville, but throughout the basin and throughout Vermont, we can begin, and we're just starting to do this now, get this nuanced picture of Native American life through time, across space and really begin to fill out the remarkable histories and pasts of these folks. So with that, I'll leave it and thanks very much. And I'm happy to take any questions. Yeah. So it's Americans and then you said these are triangles. Yeah. What did you mean by that? Just that they're triangular. Although some people call them triangles, you know, the term that we use, which was left over from the archeologists that originally defined the type was Lovanna, which is based upon an oldest state in New York state. It has no reference to anything real. But some people just call them triangles because they're ubiquitous across the Northeast around this time period, post 1000 AD. They just start going up everywhere and they're very easy to manufacture. The toughest thing with Lovannas is getting them thin enough so they would have been hafted, but otherwise they're very easy to manufacture and they were small and could be slotted into arrows versus the larger things that were meant for spears. And so it's, you see this change in technology. And they also seem to, this is an oversimplification, but they stop seeming to care about their form as much. They're much more expedient. They'll just quickly chip something out, put it on, and then post contact, we begin to see this same triangular form be replicated out of iron, brass, other things. So they're continuing to put them on arrows, but now they're utilizing the new metal resources that are coming in. Yeah? Do we have any estimates at all on what Indian population numbers were during the New York East period? Yeah, this is a great question. And someone brought this up in March and like I said then, and I will say it now, it is a very troubling. And they were problematic. Yeah, it is so problematic. And yet it's so important as baseline data to try to figure other things out about life ways. But every time someone attempts it, some other archeologist would just come out and say like, that's ridiculous, blah, blah. I mean, it's the most thankless job in archeology is to try to figure out population density. Having said that, we are getting to a point now at least in Chittin and Addison County where there's enough sites where if we really did a lot of GIS based work about how many people at this particular site might have been able to, you know, habitat there for a given period of time. And then extrapolating that out. We might in some decent, you know, not too distant future be able to give some estimates. Like at 1,000 AD, the population we estimate in the Champlain Valley was this much, at least on the Vermont side. We're getting to that point. Having said that, you know, it's tough. Yeah, but there are some interesting anthropologists that have done work about what is the minimum human population that can exist without dying out, you know, that can, you know, suffer the ebbs and flows of, you know, disease and famine. And those are very interesting statistics. And it's likely for much of Vermont's prehistory that they weren't much above that. So the average band size might have been 50 to 100, 150 people, probably not more than that. It wasn't until this late Woodland period when agriculture begins, even though as I stressed, it's not totally reliant upon agriculture like some other folks were in the Ohio Valley or in the Mississippi Valley. They were still augmenting it with a lot of natural foods. But they probably had smaller population sizes, even if they were staying with their farm fields a little bit longer than they used to. So the best guess is for the total tribe sizes of different Indian nations would have really come when the European settlers came in? Yeah, and there is a book that, you know, really has some, you know, as an archeologist, I can nitpick with a lot of the nuances of what this author writes. But his name is Charles Mann and he wrote a book called 1491, the year before Columbus came, what North America was like, or actually the Western Hemisphere was like. And he does a great job of synthesizing the broad strokes and basically saying that population estimates for North America on the year before, you know, Columbus arrived were vastly underestimated. There was probably, you know, 50, 100 million people living, you know, here. Right, and that previous estimates were very, very too, too, too low. And any case that we've looked in particular case studies, particularly in the Northeast, which was contacted so early, you know, 90 to 95% of people died or had to flee or, you know, otherwise were hidden prior to any one bothering to really begin to count. And so it's problematic and yet using archeological sites as a proxy is also problematic because we know we're only getting a sample of the sample of the, you know. So these are the various things that, you know, somebody would yell at you for as soon as you put out a paper. But any other questions? Yeah. You alluded to some of this being on the internet. Where would one go? Okay, yeah, great, great question. So the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation has a website. If you go there, think about this in my mind, and you go to the tab page on the left, you will see resources and rules. You want the resources, not the rules. And then into that, you click on digging archeology. And then in that, there's a series of publications. And many of them, you know, I will fully admit are dated. But once upon a time, the Division for Historic Preservation put forth some money or got a grant to have these things done. And I didn't want to see them go by the wayside. So I've actually been going through our old catalogs and re-scanning them and putting them on them. And with the caveat that we've learned a lot since they came out, you can get things like Jim's Seasons of Prehistory. You can get some other interesting things that were done in the 70s and 80s, some general readers' handbooks. And then I believe like Brita's publication is on the Intervail Center's website. And if you have any specific questions, you can always email me. Yeah. The technology that the Native American Jews and the Eastern women's preventing their spears and their arrowheads, that was pretty similar across the whole country, wasn't it? Well, broadly, the techniques were very similar, although only in the sense that they made stone tools with probably bone-handled things and then other harder stones. But if you talk to a flint napper or a person who recreates particular spear point or arrowhead styles using only the techniques that they would have had thousands of years ago, they will swear to you that there are a variety of differing techniques that were utilized and they have good evidence to support that. So some people just used direct percussion, using a billet or a hammer on stone. Others say that they used indirect percussion or using like what's called an ishi stick because this sort of tragic story of this Native American that came out of hiding in the Great Basin in the late 1800s was named ishi. And his technique for making spear points was to use like the weight of your body to chip them out like this on a long stick. So yes, broadly speaking, they use the same techniques, but when you get down into the nuances, actually they were quite different in quite different regions. And a lot of it depended upon the parent material that you were trying to work. If you could have, if you had obsidian nearby or happen to have it, you could almost blow on it and it would chip into, but something like quartzite, I mean, there's a quartzite quarry up in near Little Rock pond in Mount Tabor. And it's kilometer long and you probably not know what you're looking at until you went up there, but in certain areas, you can see them trying to break big cobbles of quartzite. And the only thing they can do is carry another giant boulder up like 10 feet on the cliff face and just drop it down on another because it's the only way they can break it. It's so dense. And in fact, my colleagues who do this, they've all got tennis elbow and they've had to stop napping quartzite because it just hurts too much. It's so dense. So it's remarkable, even though some of this stuff seems rough, like those up there, it's a remarkable achievement to actually make something out of the stone. It was not a very good stone. Very dense once you've finished it, but you probably have to take a nap afterward. So, yeah, done good. Yes, how many sites are there now in Vermont that have produced physical evidence of corn? Oh, corn, yeah, that's a great question. So it's increasing almost every season. So prior to this, prior to about three or four years ago, there were four sites. There was the corn cob site or otherwise known as the Donahue site. There was the Bohannon site up in Alberg. There was the Skitchewog site down on the lower Connecticut in Windsor. Very recently, there's been many more. There is another site in Alberg. There is the headquarters and porcupine sites on Route 78 in Swanton, a massive excavation that found a lot of corn in a very similar circumstance to the Winooski, an alluvial floodplain, the very, very dense home to Native Americans, the homeland of Mrs. Goyabnaki for the last 10,000 years probably, and again, village-sized settlements, in fact, including the first definitive remains of a longhouse up there, dating to around this late Woodland period. But then the first sites on the Otter Creek that have had corn have come out just recently in the last two years. In fact, the report isn't even done yet, so I can't even tell you in more detail. So the more that we're looking, the more that we're finding, and that it wasn't just, although limited to probably these major river valleys, a variety of locales did evidence corn. Yeah? In showing us all these sites on the intervail, et cetera, how can you protect them from somebody going over there and deciding to do their own dig and ruining everything? Well, here's what I'll say about that. There is an agricultural exemption, so agriculture is protected, and so if people wanna do that during the course of agriculture, with some specific exceptions, which I'm not gonna get into now, they can by and large do that. When certain things are below ground, we sometimes go out. This does have, not some overly burdensome protections, but as a state, this archeological district, we're mindful of that, but there's a lot of things that you can do. Now, if it's commercial development, if you need a permit, an Act 250, a 248 permit, if you're expanding generation facilities, that will have to be reviewed just like anything else. But it's become increasingly clear that other than farming, or potentially electric conduit or something like that, the dynamism is making it difficult to do anything out on the flood plain. And certainly, Interveal Compost is a case study in that where they eventually had to move because of the threat of flooding and the massive-scale operations there. In terms of individuals digging, if you're going out with a specific purpose to dig an archeological site, if it's private land, that is the owner's property, with the exception of human remains, which there is a protocol for, if they're found. It's the owner's property, and not specifically Interveal here, but just in Vermont. If they're not gonna be developing and they allow someone to just go and dig up their lawn, then that's perfectly acceptable. However, I much would not necessarily condone that or perhaps try to steer them into more constructive endeavors, it is property rights are sacrosanct, and they can do or allow others to do what they want on their own land. Yeah. Thank you so much. What exactly is an interveal? Yeah, so you might have walked in a little late. This was one of the first slides I showed. It's actually an early, it's taken from a Native American term, but it was anglicized early on to essentially mean a very fertile valley between mountains. And nothing suits that like the Burlington Interveal, but there are other interveals. And if you read 19th century literature, they talk about interveals, sometimes called intervals, quite often in the literature. And it's one of those New England terms, much like I just saw a presentation a few days ago about Vermont's greens, their town greens. And that's sort of a Vermont-y term and other areas they use the term common. But here in Vermont, we prefer green. So there's these regional sort of, you know, old anglicizations of words and concepts and so. Yes, there was. You just mentioned that there was, what happened to it? I don't know, except it got taken down much to the dismay of my friend who tied all of his archeological dead into that fire town. But technology saved us. So. I think that's pretty good. All right. Well, thanks a lot folks. We'll see you in a few minutes after we leave here. John has a couple of announcements, but before I will present you with an Ira Allen mug. I love this. Thank you. Since he wasn't serving. Thank you. Just a couple of things before you go please. By the way, the mug that Jess has over there is made by the gentleman sitting over by the window, Bob Compton. When you're out on a foliage ride, if you go down towards Bristol, I would highly recommend you stop in through your shop, which is about what? Maybe two miles from downtown Bristol. On the left hand side of Route 116, and you can talk to Bob before you leave. It's a great place to visit. They have, they've made fantastic items there. I told, I thought I should recognize you for that. Couple of things going on here at the homestead. On October 14th, we are having our first ever harvest dinner. There are these little flyers on the table. You can pick one up for yourself. Maybe bring one back to wherever you're going and help to promote it. And I think it's going to be a great, a great first time event here at the homestead. October 14th, that's a Saturday. On the following day, it's the third Sunday of the month, so we're having our next talk. And the gentleman coming is Paul Gillies, who's been here once before. He's a lawyer and he has written a book on early Vermont laws. And he has lots of stories, many of them numerous about some of the court cases in the very early days of Vermont, so hopefully you'll come to that. On your way out, on the right-hand side, we have some new arrivals. If you have grandchildren, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, or great-great-great-grandchildren, there are some books over there for young readers that we have about five new titles that just came in on Friday, so you might check those out. And then please help yourself in the refreshments on the left-hand side on your way out, too. All right, thank you all for coming. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.