 My pleasure to introduce Jess Robinson. Jess is the state acchaeologist, and I just want to read a little bit here about him. He's the Vermont state acchaeologist, and he works within the Division for Historic Preservation. And that's under the Agency of Commerce and Community Development. And he received, he's a native Burlingtonian, and he received his BA in Anthropology and English from the University of Vermont in 1999. 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 2015. During much of that time, Jess is also a research supervisor at the University of Vermont Consulting Archaeology Program. That's probably good. You don't have to get into the other stuff. I just want to say just a personal bit. I've known Jess for a couple of years here, and as a frequent visitor to VHS and Barry, I've been over to his offices, and they have a beautiful display over there. The artwork alone is something to see. But actually, it tells the whole story going back some 10,000 years ago of Indian inhabitants in Vermont at times when the glacier is still there. So it's a really interesting place to visit. I highly recommend it. Thanks a lot, man. Appreciate it. And thanks a lot for coming out. This is Vermont Archaeology Month. It's been going on since 1995. So I guess this is the 23rd year. It's a little bit of a stripped down year this year. We've had some transition between it, but I'm keeping the torch alive by doing various events, and I'm certainly happy to be here with all of you. So I'm going to go through what is essentially 13,000 years of prehistory. It is only going to touch on a few points. And depending upon the clock, I might skip ahead for a few things. And while this is sort of a lecture format, if something is really bugging you or you don't understand something, feel free to raise a hand or shout out. That's fine. So just really quickly, for those of you who aren't aware, archaeology is the study of the human past through the things that people left behind. Their material remains. That can be artifacts. That can be architecture in some places in the world where it preserves. It can be landscapes that are natural, that meant something to the people that inhabited them in the past or modified landscapes. And everything in between, things we call features that remain the firehards or storage bits or refuse bits. And all of that is under the purview of archaeology and what we study. And I'll give you some examples of the various things that archaeologists have studied and are currently studying and how that scope is broadening as science progresses. Just a brief overview. This is done about a year and a half ago, so it's a little out of date now. But as of about January 1st, 2017, there were 6,067 archaeological sites known in Vermont, which is a maximum site density of about 1.8 per square kilometer, which is actually below average for all the states in the US, actually quite a bit below average. Only about two to the mountainous terrain. Yeah, and the lack of testing, which I'll get to in a second, because only about 2,200 of those are Native American sites. The rest are historic homesteads and barnsteads, early military installations of forts, underwater shipwrecks, industrial archaeological sites like lion killings and potash killings, all the things that make up the rich history of our state. And as you note, the vast majority of, in fact, probably 99% or more of the archaeology that's done in Vermont is done in advance of development. So basically what we call consulting or regulatory archaeology. Various state and federal laws that encourage or in some cases require archaeological review to be done. And so this map is a sort of heat density map of where all the archaeological sites have been found to date. And as you can see, the vast majority of the archaeological sites found in Vermont have been found in Chittenden County. Why? Were there more Native Americans or early historic people? No, it's where all the development happens. Or a lot of them. Same with Addison County and a little bit in Franklin. These blips are interesting because they're in the Greenout National Forest. And they do, as a federal entity, they do a good job of documenting the archaeological resources in their forest lands. The vast majority of which are historic towns, villages that have been subsumed up into the forest after they were abandoned in the late 1800s. So if you've heard of Glastonbury or Old Job or all of these other, not just individual households or farmsteads or hamlets, but entire towns that have gone back into the forest. And they're now archaeological sites. This is just an overview. Another view, it's a small screen, so you're not going to be able to see much. But here is Chittenden County. All the red dots are Native American archaeological sites. And this is a little bit misleading because the dots are very large. It's actually not that many archaeological sites. But then here's the I-89 corridor coming up, roughly following the Winooski River. And as you get into the Montpelier area, you can see the archaeological sites really thin out. The blues are historic archaeological sites. So Native American archaeological sites, which are the subject of this talk by and large, are really absent in the interior. Why is that Native Americans were there? Absolutely not. It's because there has been little modern development after archaeological review laws and statutes came into place. And so we know that their Native Americans were here. But most of our sites have been documented through collectors or happenstance, finding things along the ponds, scouring old archives, the Hemingway gazetteers, and other town histories. So with that as a sort of background, I'm just going to sort of go through some high points. And did a pretty good job, five minutes or so. So we're on track here. Starting with the earliest Native Americans that entered the region and entered Vermont, they are not now, it is widely believed, the first Native Americans to have inhabited the continent, which this is a subject if you are at all interested in archeology and the popular press is constantly being written about how old were the first Native American that purported pre-close people. And I, like many of my colleagues, now believe that there were Native Americans earlier than the Paleo-Indians, which for a long time were thought to be the oldest now. But it's not relevant for Vermont because up until, as we'll see in a second, about 13,500 years ago, we were totally covered in glacial ice, so people couldn't live here. People weren't living on top of ice. And about 13,300 years ago, this is what Vermont looked like, more or less, at least the large lake features. The meltwater as the glaciers were receding, obviously formed water. That water was filling all of the big valley basins. And in this case, the Champlain Valley was now the Champlain Valley. All the way down into the Hudson Lowlands and was all stopped up by a huge dam down at Long Island at the Narrows. At about 13,300 years ago, this little bit of ice here gave way and a couple hundred feet of Glacial Lake Iroquois ran in and caused a catastrophic flood which blew out this dam and sent fresh water out into the Atlantic. About 100 years later, it filled up again. As further meltwater came from the glaciers, but this time, there was a catastrophic flood that eventually went out the Gulf of St. Lawrence, at what is now the St. Lawrence River. This is Glacial Lake Hitchcock, another massive Glacial Lake that formed in the Connecticut River Valley and is thought to have drained about 12,800 years ago. Could you put a finger on where Montpelier is or Calis or use Montpelier? Right about, oh, Jesus, this is tough. Right about there. And again, I'm not depicting all the Glacial Lakes. There's actually a Glacial Lake called Glacial Lake Winooski that actually came up into these interior regions. It's not very well studied. Stephen Wright at UVM has written a little bit about it as well. So basically, all this meltwater had to go somewhere and it was impounded by all this stuff that the glaciers had left behind. So it formed all these Glacial Lakes everywhere, but they were unstable. So as soon as one of these gravel dams would burst, they would drain, they would hit another water body. It was a very dynamic time period. And as far as we know, Native Americans did not live in this region at this point. But as that last major flood went out to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Glacial Ice had depressed the weight of the land in Vermont so much that it was below sea level. So seawater ran in, including to the Champlain Valley, here's a close up of it here. And for about 3,000 years ago, from about 13,000 to about 10,000 years ago, the Champlain Valley was an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that we call the Champlain Sea. And this was not a sterile water body like some of those Glacial Lakes were. They had nothing in them. They were ice cold water fed from the melting glaciers, didn't have a lot of fish, or if any, that's debated. But when it became an arm in the Atlantic Ocean, it was very thriving, cold water water body. So here, some of you might have heard of the Charlotte Whale, which is at the Perkins Museum at UVM. That was found in 1849. And when I worked at UVM, my office was right next to the Perkins Museum. And I would go in there and say, I know we can radiocarbon date this whale. I know it. The geologists say, no, you can't because they sunk it in horse glue in 1849 to preserve it. And that introduces a lot of modern carbon, which skews the radiocarbon dates. And I said, well, what if you drill into the teeth? Because I don't think that it would have gotten into the teeth. And they're like, I don't know. I leave and some guy from the New York State Museum says, hey, how about drilling into the teeth? And I'm like, oh, okay. And he got a great date from it 13,000 years ago, almost exactly. So right at the initiation of the Champlain Sea. But you can see here, you can't see here because it's the small writing, but various other marine mammals have been found in the Champlain Sea. These are the radiocarbon dated ones, and they include harbor seal, bowhead whale, finback whale, walrus, narwhal. So a very, very biotically rich, but cold water environment, much like Labrador or some of the sub-artic regions today. There were also fish that remains that have been found, including cod, and a lot of mollusk remains. So just an idea of what it might look like 13,000 years ago in the Champlain Valley, something like this. And at the same time in the Northeast, we can begin to see humans moving in. Radiocarbon dates, which are very rare for this early period. Vermont doesn't have very good preservation in its soils, nor does most of the Northeast. Nevertheless, through about 50 years of professional archeology in the region, we've identified a number of radiocarbon dates to tell us that Native Americans were roughly synchronous moving in. Just parenthetically, you might think passively that being the oldest Native Americans in the region that might be the most quote unquote primitive or simple, nothing could be further from the truth. While there were very low population densities, hunter-gatherers moving about in a landscape, they were the master lithic or stone craftsmen of the entire archeological record in Vermont. They did things with stone that no one else did, at least as far as we know in Vermont, afterward. Obviously, there were other things, other art forms that Native Americans worked in, and bone and wood, which was not around very prominently during this early period. It was a tundra-like environment. But in regards to stone, they were master craftsmen. And so I had a replicator make for me, one of these characteristic paleo-Indian spear points, quite large, very well-made with this ribbon-like flaking pattern, often made from materials that were distant from the sites where they're found. And then after they had made these large spear points, the very last thing they did before they'd be used was knock from both sides this channel up the middle. And this is the hallmark of paleo-Indian points. So really the reason you can tell them apart from any other point, also the materials by which they're made and their general expert craftsmanship defined them. But this is extremely hard to do. If you're a modern flint napper today, you're sort of considered an expert if you can pull off one of these, what are called flutings. And they result in breakage a lot of the time. So I and my colleague John Croc, a professor of anthropology at UVM and the director of the Consulting Archaeology Program, and Weatherby Dorschow from the University of New Mexico did, was we started saying, all right, where are all the paleo-Indian sites in Vermont? And this wasn't as easy of a task as you might have thought. We had to spend several years going around to farmers in the Champlain basin and elsewhere and convincing them that we weren't trying to take their artifacts. We were just interested in documenting where they found them and taking pictures and measurements and made a lot of great relationships that way. And documented securely as we could to augment the professional archaeological record, where about 30 paleo-Indian sites have been found. And then we began to map them. And then the hardest part was making a model of the Champlain sea at its maximum. And we had to use a lot of geological information, new tools like LIDAR. My colleague George Springston, who's a geologist from Norwich, really did an amazing job modeling it. And we borrowed a lot of his modeling, as well as some people from SUNY Albany. And we ended up with this map, which is at a gross level, quite accurate. And as you can see, this earliest sort of sub-period from 12,900 to 12,400, there's a notable concentration of sites, which I'll go into more detail right where the Winooski River flowed into the Champlain sea, which right now is where the big box stores are. And one of the most notable of those three sites was found during the archaeology conducted for the Chittenden County circumferential highway, most of which was never built. But a lot of archaeological sites were found during the testing for that, including one found in Williston. And at the time it was excavated, it was really interesting because we didn't really know why it would have been there. It was sort of on a really scrubby, rocky knoll. There wasn't a lot of water near it. Again, this is near the Williston Central School. A lot of excavations took place in the late 80s and early 90s at this site. Hundreds of square meters were excavated. And the site was huge, huge. Went over acres, but very, very thinly scattered. Very few artifacts per square meter, or even per square, 10 meters. And the archaeologists back then, I think, rightly surmised that that's because it was a summer encampment. They didn't need to be isolated inside shelters. They were spreading themselves out over this whole area, this knoll in the surrounding areas, and doing various activities. And cumulatively, the artifacts that came out from this are really interesting. Because at this site in Williston, you have material that's all the way from central Pennsylvania, this yellow material. This red material here is from Monsungan Lake in northern Maine. This blue, glossy, almost waxy, candy-lit material is from the Hudson Valley. Accumulative straight-line distance of roughly 850 kilometers. All stone somehow made its way to the site in Williston, Vermont. And here's a close-up. So it's a little bit hard to see, but you can see these sites. And this is where the maximum, again, a close-up, where the Champlain Sea is, and where the Winooski River would have flowed into it. And it would have been an estuary-like environment, basically where the rivers met the sea, a very biotically productive environment that would have drawn waterfowl and terrestrial mammals, marine mammals, mollusks, fish, a really great environment. And looking at that, when we look at this site, we can see that it was a little rise what was above probably a tidal flat or a near-shore environment, making it great. When you found those tools, did you find chips so that they were making them there? Oh, yeah, thousands. So they were bringing raw materials to the site? Yeah. And in fact, it hasn't really been looked at since it was written up. And I'm talking with UVM about re-going through the entire collection to really get it up to date. But we have done chemical analysis on the tools and petrographic analysis, so it's not just color. We actually know chemically that these were sourced to these particular areas. So then in the next slice, again, we have sites corresponding, in many cases, to the Champlain Sea, including this one here, right in the La Moille River in the next period. And we also have recently documented sites out of what would have been a peninsula into the Champlain Sea, and even one on an island in the Champlain Sea. Now they're just, in one case, a hill in Ferris Bergen, in one case, farmland. So you really, as archaeologists, have to project back and imagine what these environments would have looked like 13,000 years ago. And then the next one, again, not many sites known from this sub-period, but one up in Highgate would have been on an iron-like environment. Although at this point, the Champlain Sea probably receded. So it was probably not an island, but sort of a near shore environment. And then when we get to this period, we can see the sites encroaching on the maximum margins on the Champlain Sea. And why is that? Because the sea was, as the land was coming up, like a sponge being released, the elevation was coming up and the sea was draining. And so it was getting shallower, and more land was being exposed. And then finally, by the late Paleo-Indian period, up to about 10,000 or even 9,500, we can see sites really encroaching on the maximum margins of the Champlain Sea so that all of the land, except probably the major river deltas, the Missiscoe, LaMoyle, and Winooski were available for habitation. And just one of those late Paleo-Indian sites in Colchester again excavated for the not-built circumferential highway. And so what can we say cumulatively about all this? Well, clearly a lot of sites are focused on the Champlain Sea, meaning that the Champlain Sea was an attraction. It's a place they wanted to situate themselves next. And that might not seem that shocking or revolutionary to y'all. We all like to go to the ocean. But there has been a consistent sort of narrative that Paleo-Indians were these terrestrial big game hunters killing buffalo and bison and mastodon and mammoth and caribou and that they weren't really focused on marine resources. And it's a bias because all of these environments along the Atlantic or along the Pacific, where they would have been along the beaches or along the tidal marshes or along the estuaries are now under 100 plus feet of water because the oceans have been rising. But the only landlocked New England state now conversely preserve beaches that were there at the place to sea because our land has been rising. So we have this ironic and very opportunistic way to study how Paleo-Indians might have utilized marine environments. Now, all of this is sort of circumstantial. I say at every lecture that I would love to find the whale skeleton with the spear point in its head at some point and really say, but that hasn't happened yet. And it's not really likely. So we have to do the best we can with archaeological inference. Other features, glacially formed ponds and lakes were extremely important. They were critical sources of fresh water and probably hosted emerging wetland or muskeg environments. And those include Bristol pond, Moncton pond, Shelburne pond, Lake Salem upper in this region. We're getting close to this region. And then finally, travel corridors. And again, the Lake Salem corresponds to one of those. The Mad River Valley has a Paleo-Indian site known, not very well understood, and then a very well studied site down in at the base of Jackson Gore Mountain in Ludwell in a very narrow valley, but one that would have afforded easy travel from the southern Champlain Basin all the way over to the Connecticut. So very interesting. So what, again, my colleagues and I said was, well, we don't know a lot about Paleo-Indians, but we know they had these diverse, very, very good sources of raw materials from, again, all the way down in Pennsylvania or Monsungan Lake, northern Maine. So what if we modeled how people got to these sources and back? And so our colleague, Weatherby, at University of New Mexico, who's an expert in geographic information systems, or GIS analysis, really complex mapping tools, we developed this protocol where we said, all right, let's factor in slope. So assuming that people would rather go along places that are flat, or rather than going up and down mountains and hills, that they would choose the easiest path, all things being equal. Probable forest cover, which wasn't a lot at this time, but would have been an impediment. River flow and direction, its speed, and a couple of other factors. And then we said, factor that in for this entire region, and which is, you can imagine, billions of possible combinations. And then we let his giant supercomputer down at the University of New Mexico run. And a couple of days later, it came out, and we were really shocked. We did a number of analysis from here and Williston to here, here and Williston to here. But the one I'm going to show you is the one from Williston to Monsungan Lake, because it really opened our eyes, even though it was sort of intuitive once we saw it. And that's that, while there's a couple interior routes that would have taken you through the greens and the whites and then through the hill and range territory of Upper Maine, by far the easiest route would have been just to go along the Champlain Sea, either in watercraft or along the river, I mean, the winter pack ice, which because it was likely frozen over in the winter, down the Etchamon River and then into the West Branch of the Penobscot, making it far easier to get into these interior territories than we have to do now, particularly if we were on foot. So it was a real eye-opening exercise for us, and it's something that we write a fair bit about, and we're continuing to study. So from the Paleo-Indian period, we move into the Archaic period. And this is a broad sweep of time, roughly 6,000, 6,500 years, which was at its most reductive was the time of the hunter-gatherer fishers. Excuse me for a second. And there's a lot of things we can talk about, but I'm just going to spend a little time on a couple aspects that have come up recently. This is a sort of complex graph, but I'll try to break it down for you because it really sets the stage. This is a graph of calcium concentration in the Greenland ice core GISP2. It sounds kind of complex, but basically calcium in this study is sort of a proxy or as an indicator of how crazy the environment was in the past. And this is over the last 100,000 years. And of course, they sample the ice very carefully through the last 100,000 years. And like tree rings, they can see every year going back in these super deep ice cores. And what they can tell is 100,000, 80,000. There's a couple blips. 70,000, there's a big blip. But right around, well, like 68,000 years, things go haywire. And you can see all of these spikes and dips, spikes and dips, spikes and dips going all the way to the last big spike, which corresponds to the Paleo-Indian period, an event that's called the Younger Dryus. But then after the Paleo-Indian period, you have this remarkably smooth line, which is roughly the last 11,000 years. And archaeologists being interested in the long term how humans adapted and interacted with themselves and with the environment, really look at that and say, it wasn't that it was warmer, or that it was colder, or that it was wetter, or that it was drier. It's the fact that things were predictable, that you could be reasonably sure that if you found migratory caribou in this area one year, they would come the next year, or in the next decade, or the enadromous fish runs would come up the rivers the next year, or the nuts would ripen at roughly the same time in roughly the same areas. And for a lot of the last 60,000 years, even though we were fully modern humans, you could not count on that. So why would you build a village only to have it be flooded, or be parched, or be, you know, or some other environmental factor a decade from now? You wouldn't invest a lot of time and energy. You'd be moving around the landscape, trying to get to where those resources were. So it was this predictability that really set the stage for a lot of the cultural dynamism, the rise of what is called cities and a big term in archaeology, the rise of complexity. So, Jess, could you talk a little bit about that calcium stuff? Yeah, so I don't really understand myself. I just rely on people that are smarter than me. But I think what it is, it's a light element, so it floats up in the atmosphere. So if the weather patterns are complex, if the seas are rough, if there's a lot of, you know, turbation and turbulence in the environment generally, then more calcium falls onto that ice, which then gets trapped in the ice as it builds up. So it's not from a specific source or? Not that I am aware of. Although, you know, given this talk a lot, so I should probably know. I'm gonna get on the Google tonight. And again, it was a remarkably stable time the last 11,000 years or so. But there were ups and downs. Here's a crazily complex graph. But all you need to know is the black line shows after around 11,000 years ago, you get a rise in temperature, and then there's some spikes. And sometimes we can see in those spikes and dips different things happening, even here in Vermont corresponding to different things. And if we have time, I'll get to some of those. And again, the environment. Cumulatively, when we study a lot of these things, we can see how things have changed over the last 21,000 in this case years. Even subtle changes mean different forest compositions changing through time. Again, as we can tick through, I'll show you, again, the rise of mixed woodland moving north, tundra going further north as the glaciers recede, and then finally getting to where we are now. And how do we understand that? Well, one of the ways that geologists and other environmental science study plant change in the past is this really, really laborious process called sediment coring, where you basically just take a big, huge hollow tube, go out to a pond or a wetland or a lake and then plunge it into the bottom of the sediment and pull it up and then cut it in half and then like a tree ring, look at all of the sediment that's fallen into the Lake River in any given year. And in a good core, you can see almost every year through time or packets going up through time. And in several deep cores, you can go back all the way 11,000 years ago. And then if that seems laborious, then at various stages along the core, they count individual pollen grains and look at them under a microscope to see what species they came from. And from all of that, and they also have to do radiocarbon dating so they can see how far along they're going through time. But from that, you can get these really cool graphs. So like this is birch. So you can see around 11,000 years ago, there's a spike in birch, then there's a dip, and it's pretty much solid. Conversely, pine goes through the roof and then kind of drops down. These, and these have been rarely done in Vermont. This is from Sterling Pond and this is from Redder Bush Pond. So a couple of the cores that have shown at least in an area around the pond, the differences in tree species through time by that pollen counting, because they're the only two that have been done. Oh, why would the geologists? Because, that's a good question. I think because they're- I think they've guided them to believe it. They were kind of easy to get to and they were high altitude. So there hasn't been a lot of eutrophication, basically meaning inflows from modern, 19th century clear cutting and a lot of siltation and eutrophication and pollution and all that stuff. But the problem with high altitude is it gives you a skewed look at what the environment would have looked like. And that's actually a great segue into this slide because Vermont also has a really interesting altitudinal gradient to our forests. Up until about 1800 feet, we have mixed forests, you know, the beautiful fall foliage, but right about 1800 feet, it turns into boreal forest, coniferous forest. And you can see that whenever you look around. And then on the highest peaks, including here at Camel's Hump, there used to be more Mount A- Camel's Hump, Mount Mansfield, a couple others, preserve the tundra-like environment that was around 13,000, 11,000 years ago. So literally when you're hiking up these mountains, you're sort of forest community speaking, going back through time all the way up into the Pleistocene. And another really interesting thing for those of you who are interested in forest cover or, you know, are environmentalists is this gentleman whose last name is Cogbill and I forget his first name, but he and colleagues did this remarkable thing where Charlie Pogbill, he knew that in founding documents for any particular town and the first lot surveys, before stone walls were built and permanent markers, they would take a tree, a good sturdy old tree in the corner of the lot in most corners of the lots and say, okay, this is a witness tree. It's this chestnut tree in this corner of the lot. It's this elm in this corner of the lot. So Charlie and colleagues went through all the original lot markers for 760 towns throughout New England to see what the trees were like back at the time of the first surveys. Remarkable, you know, ridiculous amount of effort. So impressive. And you can't really tell any from this graph. So I made another graph which tells it, but well, one thing I'd like to show is that this red, which is predominant here, is maple. But in the pre-clear cutting and then regrowth, beach was by far the dominant tree species in Vermont, 36%. And then maples and then spruce, hemlock, birches, ashes, and then oak was quite rare, going down to chestnut, almost nonexistent, butternut, almost nonexistent, and then various things. So what I did a couple of years ago with a colleague, Brett Ostrom, who worked with me for a couple of years on a temporary basis, and I have to give her a ton of credit with this, was I had one of these harebrained ideas where I said, Brett, Brett, we have like 40 years of archeological surveys where we've done all this analysis of botanical remains and food remains. Let's go through every report and see what people reported. And she was like, and I was like, okay. But a year and a half later, we did it. And surprisingly, I thought there would be this wealth of information, but actually it's not that huge of a corpus of data, which just shows how much more we need to know. A lot of that is due to preservation. And how did we get this data? Well, things like this, which is like a roughly 5,000-year-old, the remains of a fire pit by Native Americans. You can see all the firecraft rock here. We would take this dark soil, run it through very fine flotation and mesh, take all the little bits, send it to an expert who can identify them under a microscope. And this is very impressionistic. These aren't percentages. These are actually incidences and we're running some statistics on it now. But what we can see at a general level is that it mirrors the contact period for us. You can see we have a lot of data up to about 5,000 years ago, and then our data falls off a cliff. Sites become rarer before that point, so that's a factor. But it also appears that preservation, even when we get lucky, in most cases lasts about 5,000 years. And after that, things get very dicey. But when we have data, we can see beach is prominent in every one of the things. And maple, oftentimes, there's some blips down here low. But overall, the forest composition roughly mirrors what we see in the contact period for the last 5,000 years. Yeah. Yes, are you using pollen again? No, no, no, these are actual bits of the wood, firewood, essentially. Oh, okay. What they would have, yeah. And because they didn't chop down giant trees and then buck them up because they had stone axes. And if you've ever tried to chop anything down with a stone axe, it is not easy. So until agriculture came, what we surmise is that most of the wood that they gathered was dead wood. Which in that case means that the wood probably represents some area around the site. They weren't ranging far away for particular wood species. They were just gathering the firewood that was around their particular encampment. But then when it gets burned, some of it, enough of it gets, like, just stuck. Charred. And charring is the thing that preserves it. It wouldn't last 10 years if it wasn't charred. But charring changes the chemical composition enough so that it can preserve, in some cases, up to about 5,000 years old. And then what happens is we send it to these people that actually look under a microscope and from the porosity and the different pores and channels and things, they can say, yeah, this is burnt maple. But the fragments are sometimes that small. Nut species is another thing I'll just go through quickly. Here's the major species of edible nuts in Vermont. Beech nut, hazelnut, butternut, which is a walnut species, hickory nuts, acorns. And we looked at all of the incidences of nut remains that have been found. Again, not a whole lot. But what we see is really interesting. Butternut is probably intuitively, you'd think it's delicious. People love walnuts. They're the highest incidence in almost all, or I think every category. And beech nuts, which are 30% of the entire tree species, are quite rare. Now, I've never eaten a beech nut because I'm allergic to nuts, but I have to assume that they're just gross. If you had a green kernel of corn, it's like corn-like. Well, that's interesting because part of what we have to surmise archeologically is, it's like corn. Corn only preserves that people essentially make a mistake. It falls out, it gets burned before it gets mashed into flour. And if it gets mashed into powder or flour, we will never find it archeologically. That's why we have to rely on the shells. But the shells, there's very little beech shell, and often what these are represented by is, it's rare to find nut meat, we find the shells. But in any case, butternut, if you flash back to those tree species, cog those in earlier, butternut is exceedingly rare in the overall forest canopy, which means Native Americans were going out of their way to find butternuts, you know, it's no surprise, they're delicious, but probably had something to do with how they mapped themselves onto the landscape through time. So through this, we can at least get a little idea about how people moved about in Vermont. More work to come. Let's see, I got 20 minutes left. So I'm gonna skip, let's just jump through 6,000 years of history, and let's see, we will get to... You found a, or someone found it in, it was in the bridge, a copper, a copper as, oh, I was gonna ask you what period that was from. Yeah, so yeah, I will actually talk a little bit about that. So this, I was just telling Carol and Carol, this was found in Lake Salem, and a gentleman contacted me, he was metal detecting underwater, which I didn't even know was a thing, but he contacted me and said he had found this and it was made of copper because his machine was beeping for copper and he wanted to know what it was. And I felt bad about it, but I said, you know, navigable waterways, things found in it that are older than 10 years are property in the state of Vermont. I'm sorry, but that's ours. He was not that happy about it, but he was very good and he just said, is it gonna help, is it something important? I said it's one of the most important things I've ever seen in Vermont. And so he was very great, his name was Ken Jordan, I have to give him all the credit in the world. I went up there, he showed me right where it's found, documented the thing, and now it's at the Heritage Center, preserved for all of you to see, after that bridge article, number of people came to see it, and I showed it. And why is it remarkable? Well, it's oftentimes when these are found, these are found in Native American burials, which we don't really excavate anymore. And so they were clearly precious goods, but this area in Lake Salem, I talked with some Native American folks up there, the chief and another Native American, and we agreed it wasn't an area that would have been a burial. In fact, it would have been underwater even 3,000 years ago. And so what this likely represents is an overboard loss. And it's made of copper, and Native Americans in North America, or North of Mesoamerica, didn't have smelting technology. They didn't have the ability to melt down copper and then reform it in the, or maybe they had the ability and just chose not to. But in any case, we don't see it in the archeological record in this region. So they had to rely on chemically pure macroscopic or very large drift copper. And there's only two places where you can get that, two major places in this region, Lake Superior and Nova Scotia. And Native Americans would trade all across the Eastern Woodlands from these two sources. And we haven't done any chemical testing on this yet, but it's probably from one of those two sources and made its way through trade, all the way to Lake Salem, where it probably went overboard and someone was probably very upset. And it's also remarkable because it's characteristic flaring bit end. You can even see the cold hammering on it and how they were hammering bits into it. Dates probably about 3,000 years ago, time that we call the early wooden period. And most remarkably, because it was in this lake bottom, anaerobic or non-oxidizing mud, it's like probably the day it was made. And that never, most of the time when these are recovered, these are corroded green with vertigris, just like copper does from a copper roof. You can see that 10 or 15 years, imagine 3,000 years. There's usually barely anything left. So this is a really, really remarkable artifact. Tells a great story about trade and exchange. And I'm actually looking into, I've got it carefully packaged and preserved, but I'm looking into actually putting it in nitrogen so it won't oxidize more. Can you tell a little bit about its use? Yeah, we don't really know what they were used for. We've got to imagine that these were more precious items. They were probably preserved. We know that they weren't ceremonial or religious in every case. They were probably used for non-utilitarian purposes. So they wouldn't chop down a tree with them, but they might process plants with them, or perhaps use them in feasts, or do other things that you know, you still required a sharp edge, but you wouldn't destroy it right away. How thick is that? It's about that thick, that thin, you know, here's centimeters, but you know. But we're just looking at the side of it. The sides, so this is the bit end, and this is quite sharp. And then maybe it was only a quarter or a third of an inch. Third of an inch, yep. Okay, so thin. Thin, yep, yep, but sturdy. I mean, when you pick it up, it's heavy, you know. So. When you say these are rare, like they found a dozen of them, or a hundred of them? In Vermont? In New England, maybe. Oh, New England, I would say a hundred of them, maybe. Maybe less, probably less. You know, and a lot of these, like there's numerous examples of these, again, more corroded in like the UVM's collection from, you know, the Fleming Museum, but we don't know where they came from. You know, we have no idea where they came from. So they lose their interpretive and archeological and explanatory value. They have a name? They're called Celts, basically. Or Adzis. Celts are Adzis. They're named, I just. Are you sure they're C-E-L-T? Yeah, C-E-L-T. And an Adzis is, yeah, yeah, exactly, yep. But I'm gonna jump ahead, yeah. So you're finding other copper artifacts? Very rarely. You know, almost never, you know, outside of, there's a few copper artifacts that were founded in excavation at Shelmer Pond. Once you get up to the Lake Woodland and like the beginnings of European contact, then you find a lot of copper artifacts. But pre-contact, pre-European copper, very rare. And it's just because we're, you know, in a very inauspicious area to get copper. You know, down from the Mississippi, from the Great Lakes down in the major trade routes, copper is very common at the same time period. But it wasn't easy to get to Lake Superior and it wasn't easy to get to Nova Scotia. So it becomes rarer and rarer. And we, you know, surmise that, you know, as the distance to the source becomes rarer and rarer and rarer, it gets more precious and valuable and valuable, you know. And it's difficult to ascribe a sort of secular, practical value on these things, but assuredly, you know, that's what took place. When was this discovered? Last year. Wow. Yeah. Big, big, big, big. I wrote a little thing in the Montpelier Bridge that this was one of the artifacts we talked about. And yeah, so it was neat, you know. It was out of the blue. And now it's preserved and available, you know, not on display, but people in common Where did you find it? Where was it found? Lake Salem. Lake Salem. Yeah. Which is actually, you know, an amazing little lake. A lot of remarkable things have been found. I don't encourage any of you to go out digging. Please don't. That's in, is it in Sutton or Derby? Or Derby. Derby. Yeah. And when was your article? Oh, I don't know. Time ceases to have a lot of media. 2017, if I could recall. I think it was 2018. I have it at home. Great. So let me just, you know, I'll just give a quick anecdote about trading exchange that comes from George Catlin, who's a problematic figure in studying Native Americans. But he has this anecdote in one of his books that I came across when I was in grad school. And it really highlights something about Native American exchange. Not that it's equivalent out west or in the plains to here, where he was. But he said, well, out where he was in one of the areas he was, they had wooden bows. And they were the, you know, for bows and arrows. And he said they were the sort of least valued everyday utilitarian. And if you, you know, saved up enough or had enough prestige or had whatever means necessary, you could get sort of a ram horn bow, which was much more precious, highly valued. Not only, you know, was it a better bow, but had a lot of social capital attached to it, had prestige attached to it. And he said the greatest bows were these white big bows made out of one piece of wood, sorry, one piece of material. And the people on where they were getting them, I think he was talking about the black foot, had no idea what the material was. They just knew that it was the most sacred, special, highly valued rare material. And what they actually were were whale rib bones. But they were over the mountains in the sea that they had never seen before, but they were traded down the line. And if you had enough prestige, capital, you could get one of these. And you had no idea where it was from, but it meant a lot, you know? And that anecdote comes back to me a lot with trade and exchange in these early times, that you didn't even know exactly where the source of some of these things were. You just knew that as it went along the line, it gained more and more value, social prestige, social capital, and probably cost a lot more in whatever sense that it meant. So last 10 minutes, the late Woodland period is the final period in archeological parlance before European contact. And it dates roughly about 1,000 years ago to the time of European contact, which I rounded about 400 calendar years ago. And around this time, archeologically, we can begin to see archeological signatures of the tribal entities that were around at the time of European contact. So here in most of Vermont, the Western Abnaki, across the lake, the Mohawk, Eastern Abnaki in a lot of Maine, and then Malassee, Passamaquoddy, McMack. And right around this time, corn, beans, squash, agriculture finally begins to be adopted. Why had it not been adopted? Beforehand, it's an interesting question and one that a lot of archeologists spend their time on the world over. Because you might have this idea, maybe some of you are farmers, that farming is great at quote, unquote, civilized people, brought people together. But actually, farming, when it's adopted in any given area, is horrible for people. People have studied hunter-gatherers around the world and yes, occasionally there would be periodic times of malnutrition and stress if something they were going after didn't appear or if there's drought or something like that. But most of the time, being a hunter-gatherer was great. You work an hour or two a day in terms of work, going out, getting food, getting processing, whatever. Rest of the time, you had yourself. It was fantastic. And your nutrition was great. No cavities, you know, you had a well-rounded nutrition, particularly in this part of the world where you're not relying upon one species or a few key species. And then, archeologically, in every area where archeology, where corn, beans, squash is adopted in eastern Woodland, for the vast majority of people, nutrition plummets, cavities and abscesses in the mouth and all sorts of nutritional stress emerge. People are working harder because now you've got to tend to your crops and plant them and keep the animals off. And yeah, and all of a sudden, you're working, you know, you're a 40 hour or more week and your nutrition is going down. So why do people do it? And it's an interesting question archeologically because not just here in North America, but across the world, you see it happen and happen almost everywhere. And again, about 1000 AD that happened up here in Vermont. In Vermont, we don't know if every group in Vermont adopted agriculture, but we can see signatures of it in almost all of the major river valleys. One of the most prominent areas is the intervail area in Burlington, which had a light presence before the Woodland period and it's difficult to study because it's so far down in the flood layers. You have to go 12 feet down to find some of these things. But as corn, beans, squash gets adopted, the intensity of occupation down in the intervail really skyrockets. A ton of archeological sites down there. And again, in this survey of all of the plant remains that we found, obviously we can see around 1000 AD, corn, beans, squash really emerge. But interestingly, a few plants which don't require a lot of effort to grow that archeologists call the Eastern Agricultural Complex which they include marshelder, magrass, sunkweed, amaranth. They began to be grown about 3,500 years ago in the Ohio Valley and we can see that about 2,500 years ago up in Swanton we have sunflower seeds documented. So people were growing, they weren't growing this intensive plants, but they probably had garden plots early on. Here's what 900 year old corn looks like when it's found. Looks like corn, just if you left it on the burner a little too long. And then up above the falls in Burlington, a really interesting site was excavated a number of years ago for an expansion of the National Guard base. It was found to be vulnerable to attacks so they had to put everything behind a fence. And neat little, not little, quite huge for Vermont standards, agricultural village was found, roughly 200 meters was excavated which is a big excavation in Vermont terms. Roughly concentrated where the road was gonna go, everything else was preserved. We worked to preserve everything else. So two kind of loci, I'll skip through some of these. But a lot of corn was found here. This was a great image and it's difficult to see but this black sort of mat that goes through it and then these dark areas, these are all the remains of storage pits and fire pits. And then this black mat on top of it is where people lived so intensely dropping their food and doing whatever that it organically enriched the soil like potting soil. So you can see it roughly translates to the inside of a shelter. They're probably living in there over the winter and through that course of that, tromping down the ground, they just organically enriched soil. And then right above that, here's the road fill for National Guard Road. So you can see the beer bottle sticking out. So we got very lucky that it preserved just that layer before it got stripped off for the road. And so we mapped and like a lot of archeology that's done in Vermont, we can't pick and choose where we wanna excavate. It's done because the areas are gonna be destroyed or impacted. So we have this sort of slanty line, but we think that the house went something like this. Probably a long house. 50,000 artifacts I believe came out of this excavation. The majority of which were the remains of stone tool making and other things, just little chips, but an array of patterns. So fire hard, fire hard, fire hard, fire hard, storage pit, storage pit. And one of these classic bell shaped storage pits for storing corn that really defines late woodland storage. The other locusts showing a heat map of where the artifacts are. And all of these triangles are the arrowheads or triangular projectile points that we found, kind of hundreds of them. So overall, a really interesting agricultural village. We concentrated here and here, but all of these blue dots are test pits that had Native American artifacts in them. So a huge probably village up above the Missuscoy River. And this site is great because it's the only site I've ever seen in Vermont where we ran five radio carbon dates, one on butternut, two on maize, and one on hop hornbeam. And they all came out to the exact same date, which is 1310 AD, give or take a little bit. So a late woodland, probably winter habitation up above the Winooski River. And interestingly, almost all the wood that was found here was pitch pine, which used to be, yeah, it's very sandy there. Used to be, before the 19th century, very common in this area of the Champlain Valley. And now there's less than, I think, 300 acres of pitch pine forest left in Vermont. But it was a very common forest type. And we could see that, again, through the archeological remains. Why do you think it was winter? Because of the density, that's a good question. There was a lot of things that went into that assumption. And a lot of it was the density of artifacts in the house patterns and not a lot outside of it. Also that they were up off the floodplain. So that a lot of the corn we think they were eating was actually stored corn and was brought up. And also there's interesting things like, there was a little layer of clay over all of it, which appears to, they had purposely capped the site after they left it, probably in the spring. And various things that we looked at, like wind direction, it would have been sheltered from the wind, which is something, and the prevailing elements. Basically, if you imagine that big terrace that goes up to where the National Guard base is now, it was down in the sort of lee of that. So all of these things led us to think that it was a winter habitation. So again, sort of a long house design emerging from earlier sort of bark, where we go on into long house designs. And then I'll finish in the last few minutes with probably the most extraordinary excavation that's gone on in Vermont in a generation. And that was up in Swanton for the proposed expansion of Route 78, kind of a dangerous stretch of highway, but it actually goes over one of the most intensely occupied areas of Vermont, at least as far as we know, archeologically. The area of the Mississauga Abnaki now, obviously, still considered their homeland, heartland, and just absolutely remarkable. And why is it remarkable? Well, for a number of factors, but one of them is that floodplains preserve archeological material like no other environment in Vermont. Because what happens is, say 7,000 years ago, which is the earliest evidence here, people come, they live on a surface, they do what they do, they leave eventually, then there's a flood. That drops sediment, it caps it. Then 100 years, however many years later, another group comes, they do the same thing, caps it. So through time, which I'll show you in a minute, you get this layer cake or chapter book that goes all the way up. And with these, every lens going down is a discrete occupation. Now, what I wanna show you here is the green, which is Lake Woodland. And what we can see from changes in the artifacts is that by the late winter, about 1,000 years ago, they were, Native Americans were really pushing out into the delta, where they had sort of kept into the more stable landforms further back towards what is now downtown Swanton. They're really pushing out into delta, and that's probably related to an expansion of corn fields. And also because the delta's becoming more stable. So it's difficult to see, but it just looks like a 1,000 layer cake. And every one of those layers is an occupation. In one of the test pits that they excavated, which was, I think, dated to 3,400 years old, there was a fire pit, and it still smelled like fish. Just absolutely remarkable preservation. And the Siskoe Abnak, you've worked on this project alongside the archeologists. So it was just a great experience all around. So many aspects. We had 1,900 visitors over the course of the project at the site, really great. It was just the confluence of all these great factors. Yes, before you go on, could you just tell us real quickly what happens? You start with ground, okay? Yes. I mean, I'm intrigued by the straightness of the cuts and where does all this stuff go? People ask about that stuff all the time. How do you get it so straight? What tools do you use? And I say peer pressure. I don't have the tools, but what do you do with that soil? Yeah, so it's a great question. So things get straight by heckling the new people in your crew until you make straight walls. And that is true. And you can probably attest to that, though. And what do you do with the soil? Well, this was an enormous excavation, 400 square meters. But every one of those dark lenses that they would go through, they would sample a bit, screen the rest through fine mesh to find artifacts, and then that sample, they would run through a flotation, basically cheesecloth to capture anything which were then subsequently looked through. We're still waiting for the final results of the report, but the results they got through even the, what we call phase two or sort of middle range stuff that they did a number of years ago has blown our minds. It's really increased our knowledge about Native Americans in this part of Vermont, more than any other excavation. Should you check every cubic centimeter of that pit? Or, I mean, as you take this stuff out, is everything? Yeah, I mean, we don't, you know. I mean, you can get rid of it. We screen it, we screen it. Yeah, right, right. Through screens, yeah. But that whole volume. 400 square meters. So where's all that soil go after you've screened it? Goes back in the holes after we asked that. Yeah, yeah. Is that one summer's worth? I think that was two years worth of work, yeah. And it was hard. It was, they're right next to the road because, and so there had to be a flagger and, you know, there was a couple of close calls where people who had, you know, hit happy hour, drove off the road or bring here some excavation units and, you know. And again, pottery and I'm a little bit over, but I just wanna show you this last thing more because it took me a long time to make more than anything else. And it's difficult to see, especially in this light, but that site on National Guard Road was likely an Algonquian-style multifamily longhouse, but this up here in Swanton is the real first definitive pattern of a longhouse we have. It's very difficult to see, but I'll help you out in a second with that. These multiple lines of pits going all the way around, coming down, coming over here. And this was on federal land in the Masciscoy Wildlife Refuge. And they are very careful on the refuge about what gets disturbed or not. So the compromise came, I think they sampled a one or two of these fire hearts, just took little bits of soil out for radiocarbon dating. And then they got down to here, this level, which is basically just taking the modern plow zone off, photographed it and put it back. So it's all still there preserved. But this is a sort of recreation of what it would have looked like. And again, this just took a while, so I'm gonna show it to you. I show it everywhere I go. So this is what it would have approximately looked like. That's where one of the fire hearts would have been. And then again, the sort of superstructure of the longhouse would have been covered in bark. And then this is what it would have looked like inside. Now obviously I didn't recreate every post and beam in this thing. Archeology is rarely that precise. But just to give you an idea of what it would have looked like. Nice work. Yeah, it took a while. And then coming out again and then stripping it all off. And this, although I think it probably dates earlier, is pretty much the exact location of what has been called Greylox Castle, which was the early historic Missiscoe village going into the 17th, beginning around the 1730s, but at least as far as we know, it going into the 1780s and 90s. Again, I think this dates earlier than that, but it just shows you the sort of relived on landscape through time, going back 7,000 years. And with that, I'll stop. Do families live in the longhouses? Yeah. Do they each have their own little sections in there? Yeah, and it's interesting because a lot of our analogies come from Iroquois. Longhouses, which were multifamily and they were segmented. So usually there'd be some sort of super-family relationship, either extended family or clan-based, but you'd have your little segment of the longhouse, each of which had a fire and a hole in the chimney and sort of bunks and everything. Algonqui longhouses, we presume it was more or less the same, although how they decided who got to be in a longhouses is not well understood, particularly in Vermont. In Maine, there's some analogs at Norwich Walk, some early Jesuit missions that we can look at for analogs, but still quite new. All right, thanks. Oh, yeah, go for it. I know there's been more about the dispute about the Mohawk presence on the east side of the Legion Plain. Do you see any evidence of hope? Not really, and I mean, that was, you know, Can you reiterate the question? Yeah, so is there presence of Mohawks on the eastern side, basically the Vermont side of Legion Plain? And archeologically, almost none. In fact, supposedly there was a Mohawk pot found from a site called the Riversite in Ferrisburg, but I don't know when that dates to. It could have dated post-European contact. So pre-European contact, almost none. There is some Iroquoian-esque pottery from a group that we really only know archeologically. There was only one explorer that ever contacted them, Cartier. By the time the next explorer came down, they were all gone. And whether it was disease or the Mohawk or some combination of conflict, it's a big question in archeology, they were gone. And we do see some of that pottery, particularly Northern Legion Plain, but I am of the opinion that it was Algonquian potters just sort of, not copying, but adopting a sort of broad style of pottery that was just sort of in vogue in the eastern woodlands at that time. But no Mohawk pottery. And so archeologically, once you get into the late 1700s or even the mid 1700s, yes, you can see Mohawk incursions basically captive narratives and all those things. They're coming across the lake, they went to Brandon, they went to various places. But there's no evidence of a sustained Mohawk population. Now, once you get into the 1800s, you can see them in the record start to petition for land grievances. But it's not at all clear that those reflected, at least archeological reality. And the historical record in this region up to about 1800 is very scatty and spotty. But obviously after European contact, and particularly once the Beaver Wars got going and the Mohawk had, and all the Iroquois had a massive expansionist sort of move to capture a lot of the fur trade, things got very dynamic. But prior to that archeologically, prior to European contact, we don't see it archeologically. Conversely, you see Algonquian presence on the west side of the lake? I'm less familiar, but certainly yes. I mean, there is that, again, that St. Lawrence Iroquoian pottery on the New York side of the lake, at least in the Plattsburgh area that I know of. But the New York side of the lake is very, I don't wanna say poorly, but lightly studied. A lot of that is because in the middle and southern regions, there's almost no lake shore. It pretty much goes, there's a little bench which has been thoroughly built on since the 1700s, and then the mountains. And it's not like our vast Champlain Valley on this side. So a lot of the areas that were available for study once upon a time, where Native Americans lived and would have been available once upon a time are now built over. And then once you get to the northern part of Lake Champlain, the sort of Shaezi area, it's just almost terra incognita. Nothing's been studied, we know very little. And that's probably where the Mohawk area was probably the most intense, but we know very little about it. But certainly Algonquian presence on the New York side of the lake is quite clear up through what I would term the Lake Woodland period. Getting down to those time slices of like 1400, 1500, I'm not that familiar on that side of the state. The Mohawk, yeah, go ahead, Carl. The Mohawk migration story that they came from way off in the Southwest, and when they got to the Long Lake, there was another people already here. And that's why they stopped on the west side of the lake. The ones already here were the Abinac. And there's some, not to go on, but this was called the Lake Between. It was a pretty firm boundary, and it was recognized as such. At least, like I said, until the Mohawk became very expansionist. And there's some interesting things about the creation myth of Ozeozo, or Rock Dunder in Lake Champlain. And that's an Algonquian myth, and then you can see that the Mohawks sort of call it Rozio, which is sort of like a mischaracterized version of Ozeozo, like they're adopting it later on. I mean, that's my own interpretation. I'm not a linguist. But all of these things, you sort of attest to the Algonquian presence on the eastern side of Lake Champlain, up to and including early contact, again, until this expansionist thing. Yeah. I watch way too much National Geographic. That's all right. The technology fascinates me with the lidar and all that. It seems like the state is reactive. Something's gonna happen here, so we better go in and check it out. Do you ever see the day when you could say, we've never explored there, let's fly a plane over it? Oh, a flying plane, yeah. I mean, lidar, I have to give all the credit in the world to A, the legislature, and B, to my colleagues at the Vermont Center for Geographic Information. We're in the lead, one of the leaders nationally in getting full state lidar coverage. And we will be there in about a year. In fact, you can look in most areas of the state right now, and I forget which counties, I think it's Windsor and probably Essex County, maybe Essex is done, but almost the entire area is flown with subfoot lidar. And so it's mind blowing for archeologists. In most cases, Native Americans left a kind of light footprint. But you can see a few things, which I don't wanna really elaborate on, but most of them I think are burial sites. But historically, I mean, stone walls and foundations, and I mean, you can see furrows in farm fields, and it's mind blowing. It's absolutely game changing. And for my colleagues that work in other parts of the world where there's temples, and I mean, it sees through the forest canopy. So I have a lot of colleagues, and in fact, I've done some work in the Brazilian Amazon, and every time they fly light are over there, it just is mind blowing. I mean. How has anything shown up that you're saying to yourself, I can't wait to go check that out. Well, you know, I have to iterate, perhaps this is my first time saying this, that I'm a preservationist, and so if it can be preserved, I want it to be preserved. Certainly I'm also an archeologist, so I'm interested in the stories that artifacts and archeological sites tell, but there's a lot of them that have been excavated, and so there's no shortage of narratives that are in those boxes for us to look at. And so we concentrate on the areas that are gonna be destroyed. Now having said that, you saw that map with the eastern part of the state where especially areas west of the Connecticut, it's like there's nothing known. And so we at the state do think long-term that some sort of survey in the eastern part of the state to understand what's going on there archeologically is important. But we spend a lot of time trying to get it, keep up with the next thing and the next thing. And so we work with a lot of people. I always encourage interested graduate students, people that care about the abnaki, anyone who has an interest to come and look at these materials and to check them out, to learn from them, hopefully to get graduate papers or other scholarly papers, or even just like the intervail. We work a lot with the intervail to just understand better the deep history of the farming there, because it's such an important farming hub there, things like that. And all of that feeds into then an appreciation for the deep history of Native Americans in the state and an appreciation for archeology in general. Because I sometimes say this, archeology used to be very prominent in the Northeast. A lot of the Ivy League said archeology or anthropology programs with an archeological component. And they did a lot of their work in the Northeast. A lot of it was your coin studies, but still it was an area. Now that interest has moved into Mesoamerica and South America and other areas. And there's very few graduate students that are interested in the deep and important history of this region. So the more that we can do to sort of say, hey, people were here, they were important. They have stories to tell, common research to stuff, I think the better off we're all gonna be as Vermonters, yeah. 20 or 25 years ago, Eleanor Ock, a local person, gave us a walkthrough of an old farmhouse site. And we started saying, well, when are you gonna dig it up? And she said, we don't do that anymore. And now you're talking about preservation versus archeology or there's a difference or anything. It's all the side of the same coin. And part of preservation is, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say we don't do that anymore. It's just we try not to do it if it's not gonna be destroyed for some other reason or impacted for some other reason. And particularly historic archeological sites, a lot of it can be done non-destructively, mapping the outlines of the foundation. Where is the chimney? How are the walls arrayed and the compound arrayed? A lot of that can tell you really interesting stuff about the time period, the ethnicity of the people that did that, how they were learning to make their, a lot of things they were bringing over and have a lot of details. The artifacts certainly fill in that historic story, but you have to have a really good, what we call research design to understand what you're doing before you're gonna put a lot of holes in the ground. The other reason why we say we're preservationists is Warren Morehead, who's a sort of infamous character in archeology. It seems like there wasn't a place in North America that he didn't go to. And he would write like, oh, if only I had gotten to this super important site, I could have used my skill and expertise and had it not been excavated so poorly. And then we look at him and we think he was a butcher. He did horrible things to archeological sites. And so we try as archeologists to not have that hubris because we know in 50, 100 years, you're gonna be able to wave some sort of electronic wand over the ground and know exactly what's in it without ever disturbing it at all. And so the more that we can keep in the ground and preserve for that time in that place, the better off we're gonna be. And yeah, people get that itch, they wanna go look. But as a state archeologist, if a graduate student or someone comes to me and says, I have this research design, well, I have to vet that very carefully. What is the value of going to survey it now versus using an existing collection? What can you bring to the table when otherwise be preserved for some future date? And it's not to say I wouldn't say yes or grab stakeholders and ask their opinions, but it's just to say, we don't just say, yeah, go for it. I mean, we're sort of at the time where we have to be judicious about that. Now, it's a no-brainer if it's gonna be destroyed, you go excavate it or at least a sample of it. You work with the stakeholders to come to a good resolution. But in other cases, it's a lot of the toss-up. I go to conferences every year and my steam comes out in my ears about what people are doing with new technologies and techniques. And a lot of it is non-destructive, or minimally destructive. So it's amazing. Yeah? Can you speak a little bit about what you do or don't know about native presence here through archeology? In Vermont? No, this Washington County. Oh, Washington County. Yeah, like I said, it's no doubt Native Americans were here throughout time, throughout prehistory and through contact. In fact, there's some interesting ethno-historic accounts of like, historian Jill Mudget gave me a very interesting little piece about early 1800s, like a basketry fair in Barrie and things like that. So they were here through time. And relative densities of people here versus in Champlain Valley or on the Connecticut River, that's difficult to say, A, because we don't have a lot of data. And I often say this when I teach classes, try demography or the study of populations in the ancient past is the most thankless, task an archeologist can do because you can run all the statistics in the world and as soon as you publish your paper or you put your findings out, there's a million ways to chop it to bits. It's just difficult to find out population densities or groups of people in the past, particularly in areas like here. But were they here? Were there people throughout time? Absolutely. All right, thanks, folks. Hi. Thank you. You're welcome. It's just a copy of Forever Calus, which is the history of Calus for you. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. You're very welcome. Thank you again for coming. I thank everybody for coming.