 Hi everyone! This is Dan O'Neill, the Executive Director of the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum. Before we get to our third Sunday presentation, I would like to thank the following businesses for sponsoring today's lecture. They made a vital investment in our museum, and their support is why we are able to bring you this lecture series at no charge. This month, we are really excited to bring you Jess Robinson. Jess is Vermont's state archaeologist. He works within the Division for Historic Preservation in Montpelier. Jess received his bachelor's in anthropology in English from the University of Vermont in 1999, his master's in literature from the University of Kent in 2001, his master's in anthropology from the University at Albany SUNY in 2008, and his PhD in anthropology from the University at Albany SUNY in 2015. During that time, Jess was also a research supervisor at the University of Vermont's Consulting Archaeology program. As the state archaeologist, Jess is centrally concerned with the stewardship, preservation, and interpretation of Vermont's rich archaeological past. His own research explores issues surrounding Native American long-distance material exchange, ritual elaboration, and social crises as these phenomenon are evidence in the northeastern archaeological record. He has authored or co-authored a number of journal articles, book chapters, conference papers, and technical reports about these and other topics. We are very pleased to bring you Jess Robinson. Hey, folks. Thanks for letting me join you today. I love giving presentations at the Ethan Allen Homestead. I've done it a few times over recent years, and I'm sorry that we can't be doing it in person. Hopefully, pretty soon, if not by the others, we'll be able to. But I'm happy to have been asked, and I'm happy to be presenting today on a topic that I've been thinking about various parts of it for a while, and the synthesis today, such as it is, is still an ongoing thought work, and it was spurned on partially by Fred Wiseman's work in Seeds of Renewal and an early agriculture, and I thought I'd present some new information about that to you. And also just bring up some new or relatively recent research on the Woodland period in Vermont. So the Woodland period in Vermont is roughly defined between 3,000 years and right to the time of European contact or right around 400 years before present. Obviously, those are both moving targets on either end, but in as much as we try to have some typological boundaries on these things, which certainly in the woodland world probably had very little meaning at all, it divides the past into chunks that we can take a closer look at. Again, not only in Vermont, but in Northeastern archaeology, this is roughly 3,000 years ago to the time of European contact. So the earliest part of this, the early Woodland period, is quite interesting. And while some of these dates, as I just said, are arbitrary, some things were occurring right around 3,000 years ago, beginning around 3,000 years ago, that were really quite interesting. One was that an inter-regional interaction sphere emerged, not in necessarily utilitarian materials, but in non-utilitarian materials, slate that was turned into pendants and different sorts of ornamental objects, copper that was turned into beads and other ornamentation for the body, or sometimes a sort of display objects, galena or a lead ore that was primarily, we believe, used for paint and pigment, perhaps on the body, perhaps for other things. Lithic materials, but that were often not utilized for your everyday spear point or arrow point, but rather were made into elaborate, sometimes quite large, or what archaeologists call hypertrophic spear points that were probably ceremonial or sociologically important. Pipestone that was turned into smoking pipes, which obviously had a cosmological ritual and social significance as well. And I'm not going to dwell on this aspect, I've actually talked about this a bit before, but it is notable that Vermont and the Champlain Valley was really a kind of a nexus of where a lot of these far-flung trading routes were, and that's evidenced in some of the ceremonial and religious and cemetery sites we see in Vermont. And most of these material did end up in Native American cemeteries as far as we understand, but there are a few that were not that have been found in non-cemetery contexts, including a copper axe found in Lake Salem, likely from Drift Copper from Michigan, and a ceremony of Blade of Roma Church found along Missuskoe about 50 years ago in Berkshire. But the other interesting thing that happened around 3,000 years ago was the emergence of ceramic technology in the region, and not just in this region, but in the Great Lakes region and the Appalachians and the Ohio Valley, everywhere pottery began to be produced around this time. And it was very distinctive pottery, one, it was, had all the hallmarks of sort of early experimentation, much of the pottery that's from this time period is quite small, almost drinking cup-sized vessels, much of it was kind of poorly made as if they were starting to experiment with these new technologies, and it has some characteristic attributes, most notably fabric compressions on the interior of the vessel and the exterior of the vessel, that might have served as some kind of decoration, but also helped smooth get the air bubbles out of the pottery, and was actually a technique that was practiced intermittently right up until European contact and beyond. My colleague Charlie Paik, when he did a replica of study of Native American ceramic technology, using really only the materials that they would have had to have been available to them, noted when you were firing this pottery that there really was an interesting cosmological or ritual aspect to it, if you were so inclined in that the pottery itself begins to glow, takes on a lot of attributes, and so while pottery certainly was and became definitely a very utilitarian implement, important for everyday life, a technological revolution in a lot of ways, we also can't forget that it was probably, especially in these beginning times, are really probably socially and perhaps cosmologically a ritually loaded event when these pots were constructed, but also as I said this pottery was impressed with fabric, which then if you take clay and you carefully apply it to a good fragment of the pottery that preserves that impression, you can actually reconstruct through these negative impressions what this ancient fabric would have looked like, and you can reconstruct as my mentor Jim Peterson did, the weave and the weft, the kinds of fabric that were made, the different technologies that came into it, but one of the most fundamental attributes that is preserved in this is what is called cordage twist, and this is simply taking two plies of a fabric and you either twist it one way, which is often called S twist, or if you twist it the opposite way counterclockwise, it's called a Z twist, doesn't matter which direction you flip the cordage, it will always look this way, and this is a sort of patterning that's really almost unconscious, ethnographic studies of different indigenous groups, normally fabric is created by women, although not exclusively, and what they documented was that women teach their daughters to either roll the cordage up the thigh or roll the cordage down the thigh, there's not a lot of conscious thought that goes into this, but nevertheless there is this difference taught through learning networks through generations, and again my mentor and real important person in Vermont and northeastern archaeology, Jim Peterson, while he was in graduate school published with his colleague, Nate Hamilton, a survey of these cordage twist directions during this early woodland period, and if there was anything that you could get in terms of potential ethnicity or social difference in the way that this cordage was made, and I readdressed this a couple of years ago to see if those interpretations still held up, and also add to the existing corpus of documented cordage twist directions in the northeast, and so we'll just go through a few here, the Missusquai Wildlife Refuge headquarters and porcupine sites, which we'll talk about again in a minute, had some really remarkable vessel fragments of this Venet 1 pottery, you can see here vessel 19, dated to roughly 2,350 years ago, had an est twist cordage throughout, just some other early woodland deposits at the porcupine site at Route 78, Canaan Bridge site which was excavated in the early 1990s, I'll just go through some slides here, a very important early woodland site, and early middle woodland site, lots of firecracked rock features, the remains of a lot of nuts, including butternut, important fish remains, a really important site for this period, especially on the Upper Connecticut, but it also contained Venet 1 pottery, dated to 2,550 years ago, plus or minus, with a distinct est twist cordage, another site in Newbury on the Connecticut, the Carson Farm site, again, dated to a very similar timeline, had est twist cordage as well, and so those were just a few of the sites I added to this database that Jim Peterson and Nathan Hamilton had already compiled and looked across the eastern woodlands, but here is just the New England region, and I'll highlight in a minute this local region, but what you can see here is very much affirming what Jim Peterson and Nate Hamilton saw in the mid-80s, which is that the dark blue indicates mostly or fully est twist cordage at sites, except with the notable exception of the Isle-O-Mott Cemetery up in Isle-O-Mott, you can see a very strong predominance of est twist cordage, all in the interior, certainly in Vermont and New Hampshire, in southern New England as well, but then in the Gulf of Maine, a very distinct cordage difference, and this affirms what Peterson and Hamilton were discussing, which that there does seem to be, at least by this one marker, a very interesting ethnic difference on the main coast that might have been a carryover all the way from the archaic period where the maritime archaic was located on this, that perhaps learning different networks were different, perhaps lineages, it's obviously difficult to say with this limited proxy, but there are others as well, and so it's a very interesting case of using very, very small technological attributes preserved in the archaeological record and making sort of synthetic and broad-reaching inferences, not definitive in any case, this is not looking at biological realities or anything, but does offer one line of evidence, and just I love it as an interesting example of very, very small attribute that can be elucidate broad patterns in prehistory or at least help to. So the rest of this presentation, I'm going to be moving on to food and environment, and some new interesting things that we are coming to light in the last few years, and are still very much being thought about and ruminated about, and also a little bit about lithic procurement patterns in the late woodland period too, so while after the late Pleistocene, after about 10,000 years ago, there the environment did become steady, much more regular than it had been during the long up and down dynamic swings of the Ice Age. Nevertheless, there were fluctuations in temperature, the previous slide, usages, see that, not great fluctuations in temperature, but enough that as you can see here, forest compositions changed over time, temperature shifted, different plant and animal communities were on the ascendance or descendance. And that is important implications for how Native people, the Abnaki and their neighbors lived in the past, how they could make out on the landscape favorable locations for settlement, and all of these things that we can at least try to get at in the archaeological record. How environmental scientists piece the environment in the past together is largely through sediment cores and other proxies, but counting pollen percentages over time in lakes and ponds. And Vermont is pretty interesting, like some other New England states, in that we have a very distinct altitudinal gradient as well, where below about 1800 feet, it's mixed woodland with a lot of deciduous forest trees among them. You can see the lower third of this photograph shows that pines and coniferous trees mixed in with a lot of deciduous trees, but above 1800 feet, you really get into boreal forest conditions. And then at the very tops of the greens or whites, you get in a few places a remnant arctic tundra left over from the Pleistocene. And so really as you're going uphill in Vermont, if you're going on a hike from Campbell's Hump or Mount Aide, for instance, you're almost going back in time through forest conditions until if you get to the tops of the mountains, you're looking at sort of an analog of what the late Pleistocene 11, 12,000 years ago would have looked like. But additionally, forests have changed over the last few hundred years, largely due to Euro-American impositions on the forest canopy, largely through cutting down. And this is an interesting study that was done by Thomson et al, including Charles Cobbville, that noted that the pre-colonial forest was really beach-heavy, and then a strong gradient of oak down in southern New England. This red sort of tint here you can see is the predominance of beach. And that was most of the forest cover in Vermont, as you all probably know, was cut down for farming in the 19th century. And when it was regrown purposely, species were selected for a number of attributes, but including their economic importance. And of course, maple was replanted. And you can see this bright red is the predominance of maple in New England. And we can actually see that when we look, oh, here's just a slide, again, showing the percentages of trees at around the time of European contact, as documented through Thomson et al, Cobbville. And you can see the predominance of beaches, maples or necks, spruces, and then things like butternuts are almost non-existent. They are there, but you really have to hunt them out. And that informs what I'm about to say. Just not very, very small. And of course, the archaeological record can help us inform what native folks were eating in the past when using for medicinal plants, what would they were burning, and by extension, get indirectly at the environments in the past. And so this is a few years old now, and we're actually going to update this and fill it out a little bit more with new analyses. But we took 136 features where paleo-botanical analyses have been done and plotted them and then did some presence or absence. These aren't statistical averages, but rather presence or absence, but are still quite interesting, just showing what a typical Native American feature would have looked like. And then here are tree species. And like Cobbville, you can see, again, these are incidences. These are not statistical abundances. But beach, very prominent from 5,000 years on, is the most prominent tax in terms of number of specimens identified. Certainly, pop hornbeam is also important. Maple is important, but fluctuates through time. And different species down the line. But important, the forest character, as revealed through the presence of wood charcoal, shows or provides more evidence like Cobbville. Different types of nut species in Vermont that could be utilized for food. And again, we can see through time, again, these are incidences. But butternut in every single period was the predominant nut species being sought after, or at least as revealed in archaeological sites. Now, there could be some preservation issues, butternut shells and nut meat might be more robust. And so survive a little bit better. But nevertheless, it's an overrepresentation, given how in the previous couple of slides, I told you how rare butternut trees were in general in Vermont, which means that butternuts were sought after nut and were probably not just haphazardly encountered, but people were going out on specific forays to gather these nuts and bring them back and processing them en masse. And so they might have been favored because of the fats and oils that contained within them, perhaps they just tasted better, perhaps they preserved better, but they seem to have been overrepresented. And we'll get to some of that in a minute. And then cultogens. Yes, all the evidence confirms that corn or maize came in right around 1000 years ago, around 1000 AD. We haven't found any samples of actual maize that predate that. But interestingly, kinepodium or goosefoot seems to have been grown intermittently at least around 3000 years ago. It's difficult to determine domesticated goose foot from wild goosefoot, but it is represented in a lot of archaeological sites beginning around that time period and not before. So it makes sense that it was at least a low level horticultural crop. We have one incidence of sunflower between three and 2000 years ago at the headquarters site in Route 78, which we're going to get to in a minute. And then beans and squash as well. And then just notably, I mentioned the Carson Farm site before, with the Venet 1 pottery from the early Woodland period, a sample of that pottery was actually sampled by oops, by my colleague, Karin Tashay at Laval University, and was looking for the presence of lipids or fats preserved within the pottery matrix. And she identified clear freshwater fish fats in that pottery shirt, indicating that there are new technologies that we can leverage on pottery and other materials that can start to tell us more about the life ways of the proto-abnac in other Native American groups in the past. One other thing, dating to that early time period, I just want to mention is that this is from the foot site in Cornwall, Vermont. You can see the feature I'm about to show you is this large area in yellow or yellow tan. This was excavated in the late 2000s, 2009, I believe, or maybe even a little bit earlier. But notably, this enormous roasting pit, which you can see spreads at least the amount that they uncovered, spread over 20 or 30 square meters, and there's more in the intact ground. This is what it looked like in cross-section, just an immense amount of fire-cracked rock and fire reddened in blackened soil, a lot of material in that, including a lot of nuts. This feature dated to roughly 3,100 years ago. And the presence and the use of these large roasting pits has been somewhat unclear, but recent research in the Pacific Northwest has indicated that these were actually tuber roasting pits. And so, while we don't have any evidence of the remains of tubers, because they don't preserve that well, except for phytoliths and actually, or starch grains, and we actually don't have anyone in this region that's looking for that material on a commercial basis that I can actually hire out to get those analyses done, it remains conjecture, but I believe that that is what these are. And so it's, again, if we can get some samples of that fire-cracked rock, which we have retained at the Vermont Archaeology Heritage Center, and get them analyzed, we might be able to tell a lot of different things about that. So I'm still looking. So for the final part of this talk, I wanted to move to the late Woodland period and just talk about a few things that we've seen for some recent reports done in this case, largely by the Northeastern Archaeology Research Center and the UVM Consulting Archaeology Program. The late Woodland period dates from around a thousand years ago to the time of European contact. And as I mentioned previously, it was really the time when corn, bean, squash agriculture comes into play. And a question has always been, what degree did lifeways change with the introduction of agriculture? What did it do? Did it shift native populations' settlement patterns? Did they become much more reliant on domesticated crops? And some recent sites are lending some insight into this that have been excavated between in the last five to ten years, but the reports have come in, you know, over the last few years. And so some interesting new data here. Again, just a diagram of maize. Typical early depictions of native agriculture. In this case, you're a coin group. A couple of quotes that provide some potential insight into the Abnaki and other groups in the Champlain Valley. They don't specifically say which side, so it's difficult to know. But this is Champlain saying that he saw planes productive and grain, such as I had eaten in this country together with many kinds of fruit without limit. Again, talking about cleared agricultural foods, growing domesticated crops, and then kinds of fruit, potentially referring to melons or squash. This is from Sanders, a history of the Indian wars in 1828, notable because he was one of the first presidents of UVM. And so even though it was a nationwide early study, he spent a few chapters talking about native groups in Vermont. And quoting here, Indian cornfields are plainly to be seen in various parts of Vermont. In the intervals of 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. There can be no richer land. And then Pete Thomas, as part of his dissertation on the Fort Hill Sikoki site in the lower Vermont portion of the Connecticut, reconstructed a seasonal round based upon historic and ethno-historic records of the Abnaki at that time. And yes, maize was important, both the growing season and then for storage, as were beans and squash, but so were a variety of other wild animals and plants. This is highlighting the animals here and notably include deer throughout most of the season, dropping off a little bit in the summer. But moose, shad, salmon, small mammals, wild plants, waterfowl, all of these non-anadromous fish or non-running fish, all of these were important in the seasonal round. And indicating that unlike Iroquoian groups that really were transformed by agriculture, moved into sedentary villages, became very reliant on domesticated agricultural crops. That, yes, maize, beans, squash were important, but still hunting and gathering, foraging, were important components of the overall diet and therefore probably had some notable impact on settlements, lifewaves, as we might imagine. So what archaeological evidence do we have for some of this? Well, I talked about this before, I believe with Ethan Allen Homestead, but the Route 78 Improvement Project, the headquarters in Porcupine Sites in Swanton, Vermont, were really incredibly important and still are for understanding pre-contact, abnacky, lifeways in not only in the Swanton and Missiscoe region, but throughout all of Vermont, certainly in the Champlain Valley. This project was done in advance of a proposed road widening as it has yet to happen yet along the Route 78. Much of this was in the Missiscoe Wildlife Refuge, but not all of it. Radiocarbon dates spanning through the late Archaic and into, all right up to the time of European contact. Many dates, these are from the phase one and two, but there's actually many more now, we're still awaiting the phase three or the final volumes to be produced because this was an enormous undertaking. And this slide here shows something that Ellie Cowey, the director of the Northeast Archaeology Research Center at the time, noted, which is that through time, you can see the earliest sites are the furthest upriver closest to the town of Swanton now and are very small and not only do sites grow through time in terms of their size, by the blue is the middle woodland beginning around 2,000 years ago, going out further out in the Delta, but by the late Woodland period, they're going much farther out in the Delta, likely utilizing these newly emerged or stabilized and dry flood plain areas for agriculture. The flood deposits preserve things not only very well, but also as a layer cake, so you can go down through time and see remarkably well preserved things, cases that are not always true at archaeological sites in Vermont. Among the most notable finds there was the first definitive longhouse identified in Vermont dating to around 1200 A.D., so quite early. Here's just a little video reconstruction if I can get it going about what this might have looked like. This is not to scale, this is just sort of impressionistic to imagine for those of you who can't see the patterns here at home, what it might have looked like. And associated with this longhouse was you can see these fine sediment layers are a midden or a sort of trash area along what was then probably the bank of the Musiscoy, preserving all sorts of food remains, waste materials as well in terms of the remains of stone tool making, pottery fragments, all sorts of things that are preserved in this midden sediment. Among those of course was maize kernels and other parts, but also abundant wild rice, butternut, acorn, shagbark, hickory nut, kinepodium or goose foot again, grape, blueberry, and a variety of other wild plant foods. Animal remains included in abundance of deer, as is common throughout the entire archaeological record from the early archaic 10,000 years ago, right up to the time of European contact, but also beaver, martin and a variety of fish here as well. Notable, amazing collection of pottery throughout the early to the late woodland period. And our, you know, Ellie Cowie from the Northeast Archaeology Research Center was just writing recently about some really interesting things that she's seeing in the pottery assemblage because it's really unparalleled in Vermont. Characteristic late woodland spear points or arrowheads probably by this time called lavana type, these triangular points, and you can see the predominance of this gray sparkly material called quartzite, but also here a darker chirp called hathaway chirp, and what's notable is this is the only site I'm going to be referring to in the next 15 minutes or so where hathaway chirp is represented in any abundance in the late woodland assemblage. And that doesn't seem that surprising because the source of hathaway chirp is in the St. Albans area and on some of the islands in this St. Albans Bay, so it's very close, but we're going to see an interesting pattern when we go to some other sites. And this is just a late woodland pipe on the right fragment showing smoking pipes were represented as well. Moving close to the Ethan Allen Homestead, the Donahue or Corncob site, has a very similar pattern and what I'm showing here in both the previous site and now is those sites that are on the lowest reaches of the major rivers, the big deltas, probably the most fertile areas where we would expect the largest late woodland settlements to be because of the fertile flood plains, but also potentially some dynamic areas. And I can show you this slide here where this is a schematic of the Winooski River and the dark area is 1802. It's tracked through the the interval, 1830 is slightly lighter blue, 1869 is even lighter blue, and then the modern is the lightest blue. And you can see even through the interval area how much the Winooski River has meandered. And when it meanders like that archaeological sites that were formerly on the on the edges would be destroyed. Conversely, you can see the green and the red arrows indicate areas that red areas indicate former channels that's LIDAR that are hundreds of years old and the green arrows indicate channels that are potentially thousands of years old. And you can see that the native proto-abnaki archaeological sites in the delta really correspond to these former and occasionally current channels. So proximity to these lower reaches was quite important. The Donahue site was radiocarbon dated to approximately 1415 AD. And again, there was important maize here and we'll get to that in the next slide. But there was also an abundance of butternuts, acorns, grape, deer, and fish. Donahue site is currently the only site in Vermont where intact maize cobs and partial cobs were recovered, meaning that they were almost certainly grown locally because from everything we understand, cobs or corn kernels were quickly processed into flour or other food stuff. And so what this indicates is that this corn was likely grown locally. Unfortunately, when it was found in the in the late 1970s, they covered all of the materials with with glue, which makes radiocarbon dating or other analyses pretty difficult or impossible. Also, you can see a preserved in in dirt matrix on the lower left, a deer mandible, again indicating the importance of hunting. And these quartzite levanas, one is a dark chert from the southern Lake Champlain area and quartzite scraping tools and then characteristic late woodland in sized pottery. So those are the lower reaches. Then we move up into the mid reaches. Above the falls in this case of along the Manuski River, we get to South Burlington and a site near the airport excavated in advance of a of a road alignment change. And this site was was quite remarkable, not along the flood plain, but on a much higher terrace right near sort of the base of the airport. But a very, very large late woodland abnaki site. You can see the profiles here. We don't have to get into that. But below the modern road fill immediately adjacent to the road, you can see the bottle sticking out there showing the modern fill in the in the lower right of the photo was this dense what we call anthra sol or Native American living surface filled with artifacts. And underneath that were definitive features storage pits, refuse pits, fire hearts. I don't have a picture of the actual levanas from this, but out of 113 recovered from this site from the phase three excavations, all but three were made from quartz site notable again, we'll get to that in a minute. You can see the map in the one of the main concentrations here of one of the blocks of the fire pits, the storage pits, the refuse pits. One of these pits was a very telltale bell shaped storage jar, storage pit, completely empty of food remains but likely used for storing corn. And the heat map on the right shows where all of the artifacts were found in the densest areas were in this this concentration of features. We didn't find any post molds or an alignment like they found a route 78, but we do hypothesize that it was this locus was probably a longhouse type structure, perhaps not as long or as as large as that was found on on the missus koi. Another locus of the site, which I'll show you the map in a minute, was much less clear no features were found but a real abundance of flakes and lithic debitage and then on the right the the lavana type arrowheads found along there. And excavations were only conducted for the road alignment and so you see where these two blocks were where the where the road is going with the white underlying it, the heat map underlying it but all of those blue dots indicated areas where artifacts were found. They're currently preserved in place but you can see the probable size of this settlement really huge and those green squares that you see were radiocarbon dated materials including maize all the way up in the current forest butternut again represented and all of them came out to 1315 AD. So what do we see here off the floodplain probably a settlement that was very large probably dated in the winter maize materials were represented but not in overabundance and nuts were equally as common. We'll just go through these quickly again even further up in Jonesville at the at the confluence of the Huntington and and the Winooski. This site radiocarbon dated to approximately 1500 no maize here at all but a huge amount of butternuts in fact this perhaps was one of these collection and processing places but also a great great variety of not only really characteristic pottery high predominance of quartzite, bare remains you can just see a few excavation photos here. Again these important floodplain settlements, sediments preserving these ancient settlements in pretty good context. A couple excavation photos on the right but then all of the food remains that they got or animal remains, bear, deer, beaver, porcupine, skunk, fisher, rabbit, muskrat, mink, squirrel, chipmunk. So still quite a sizable site we can't really get at the numbers of residents at this site but pretty sizable characteristic of the Lake Woodland period but much more focused on hunting and nut collection. Moving to the Otter Creek in the last five minutes or so I'm enough to really hurry. This is a note from Peter Kahn and when he went over he was an early explorer, went to Fort St. Frederick in the in the 1730s, went over what is now Port Henry and looked across the lake to along the Otter Creek and up towards the Green Mountains and saw fires burning and you can see this quote here which he later attributed to Native Americans trying to drive game but much more likely they were probably clearing areas for agriculture or a combination of both and we've recently seen that again not at the mouths of the Otter Creek in this case but mid-reaches and waybridge at places like the Wyman Island site VT AD 44. Again remarkably preserved floodplain sediments. Again these were done in advance of a dam re-licensing and so only areas that were subject to heavy erosion and really only along the eroded banks were the excavations conducted so we don't have a full view of the fields this is impact specific but even that remarkable evidence at a number of sites for maize yes but also kina podium elderberry blueberry you can see the the remains here and an over abundance of quartzite and the complete absence of hathaway chert Pottery from the site one more the Wyman Island site in waybridge as well again for dam re-licensing the features at this site were almost all late woodland in age many of them contain maize but also a number of nut and wild plant seeds domesticated bean sunflower dated throughout various portions of the late woodland period and again a very over abundance of quartzite and because I'm running out of time I'll just show one more a couple more sites here moving to the lamoille and Milton right up near the Peterson dam no maize here but a variety of fish deer and beaver remains from a number of different features or fire hearts and an over abundance of quartzite here as well and finally the last the last category of site were much more hunting related up off the flood plains into the high terraces in the woodlands very very small sites but one of the most notable at camp johnson was a very small site in terms of its aerial extent or geographic extent very tight but within this roughly dated to around 1315 ad a huge number in this case totally quartzite arrowheads and a lot of deer marten and bird remains showing that this was probably a hunting camp probably one two three individuals for a few days and I won't show the last site but to sum up what we have discovered over the last few years and it's the royal read this we have to really you know give all due credit to the consultants neark and uvm cap doing this work is that the lower flood plains the lower delta reaches of the of the rivers were certainly intense focus areas probably had the largest settlements but there were settlements on the mid reaches of these rivers they probably were garling maize at least intermittently as well that it wasn't all focused on the lower reaches and that that there's very intense but small and an aerial extent focused hunting and extraction camps as well and that the the the entire landscape seems to have been well parsed out and why I highlighted the the quartzite is that relative to the previous middle woodland period there is a distinct shift towards this material that outcrops in abundance but not really uh in the northern greens at outcrops in the central and southern greens and yet it is far far over represented uh at almost every large late woodland site we've seen with the notable exception of the headquarters and porcupine sites which are again along the missus koi hinting at perhaps some sort of territoriality some some shift towards those areas begins really right around the start of the late woodland period so we're not quite sure what to make of that yet but it's it's an interesting line of inquiry and so with that I think I'll stop sharing my screen and hand it back to uh Dan next month we are really excited to bring you shelby balik shelby is a history professor at metropolitan state university in denver and she has agreed to present on women and religion on the vermont frontier for this month and as always if you enjoyed this presentation and would like to support the ethan alan homestead please go to the donation link in the description box below or on our website ethan alan homestead.org thank you very much and we'll see you next month