Home Is a Landscape
For many people, home is not one spot on the landscape, it can be many places. In A Deep Presence: 13,000 Years of Native American History, archaeologist Robert Goodby, a professor of anthropology at Franklin Pierce University, writes a compelling story of the archaeological discoveries that help fill in some of the mysteries of Native American life and movement across the Monadnock region of New Hampshire over millennia. Based on 30 years of fieldwork, Goodby describes with great detail the tools, pottery, stonework, and other records revealed at archaeological sites along rivers and wetlands, in forests and fields. Each site has yielded insights into past inhabitants’ life in this region, along with hints at the vast social networks that existed before European settlement. Goodby goes beyond archaeology, seeking answers from Native scholars, storytellers, and others to learn about the past and from contemporary practices, including recent efforts to revitalize and share Abenaki culture. Stories of the Abenaki people show a broad understanding of home in their own practices and the oral and written histories they have shared from one generation to the next. Goodby also explores the cultural forces that have obscured the history of Native Americans’ presence on the land and influenced society’s shared understanding of this place.
In this excerpt from A Deep Presence, Goodby recounts a decade of careful study of the Swanzey Fish Dam in the Ashuelot River, showing evidence the dam was built to harvest migratory fish.
After weeks of work, we were finding valuable information about the age of the Swanzey Fish Dam. All that was missing was evidence of fire, but that too would come, in the form of three hearths made of densely packed river cobbles, reddened and cracked by high heat. While the tops of these hearths had been disturbed by years of plowing, the remainder was intact, and two of these yielded small pieces of burned wood, recovered between the pieces of reddened stone, that were submitted for radiocarbon dating. Both dates were essentially the same, one spanning between 3,480 and 3,900 years before present, and the second between 3,635 and 4,155 years before present—both consistent with the stylistic age of the stone tools. So, the dam was built by Native Americans, the first use of the dam occurred around 4,000 years ago, and the thin-walled decorated pottery showed its use had continued up until the time of European contact, explaining how the first settlers knew it was an Indian dam.
As if to help make the picture complete, in 2010 the Homestead Woolen Mill Dam was removed again, this time for good, part of an effort to restore migratory fish populations in the Ashuelot. Just as in 1950, the water level at the fish dam dropped, the water ran more swiftly, the silt was washed away, and the old Indian dam rose again, there for all to see, stubbornly asserting that Native people had indeed been here. This also provided the chance to create a detailed map of the entire dam, so on a cold day in late November of 2012, with my surveyor-archaeologist friend Garrett Evans, we mapped the stones of the dam using a total station, Garrett high and dry on the bank using the sophisticated surveying instrument, and me, less skilled, in the frigid water with high rubber boots, holding the prism pole on every sizeable stone I could see. The result was a clear picture of the entire dam; rather than a V, it looked more like a giant check-mark, creating a barrier that would have forced migrating fish to the banks in the spring and confined eels in the apex in the fall. The dam took advantage of several large, naturally occurring boulders in the riverbed, connecting them with walls of smaller boulders and river cobbles to form a barrier that extended from one bank to the next.
By 2012, after ten years of episodic work, the question of the Swanzey Fish Dam had been answered. It was built by Native Americans, dating back at least 4,000 years, showing that Native Americans in New England had built substantial structures out of stone. Nor was it unique. In 2004, Franklin Pierce student Quinn Ogden (who would go on to a career as a professional archaeologist) completed a senior thesis showing that V-shaped dams are in fact well-documented across much of eastern North America, but just hadn’t been seen in New England. Once again, the Native inhabitants of the Monadnock region were not isolated but integrated into a network of shared traditions that extended for thousands of miles.
As important as the findings about the dam were, though, there was something even more important that emerged from this work. Putting together all the historical records, the collections by amateur archaeologists, Price’s map, and the work at the Whipple and Swanzey Fish Dam sites, it was apparent that the area around Sawyer’s Crossing had been occupied continuously by Native people for more than 12,000 years. Rather than being a transitory stop for nomadic people, this was a central place, lived in and returned to for more than 400 generations. Its permanence was different than that understood by the White settlers; instead of living here year-round, the Native people returned every season for an immense span of years. Families gathered there, children were born, people died and were buried, making it a sacred place as well as a place to fish. The first people arrived when the last of the mammoths and mastodons were dying off, and they were still here when the Europeans came, choosing this location to build a fort as their hold on their ancient homeland grew uncertain. It is this continuity, this deep sense of time and place, that is shown by all the archaeological work. Although the memories of this place may have faded or disappeared and its Abenaki name become lost in the bloody history of the last few centuries, the fact of that continuity remains.
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