Toolmaking “flakes” found in the center of the lot during the dig last Thursday were pieces of Blue Hills Rhyolite that chipped off hundreds of years ago when a native was forming a tool or a weapon. Seth Daniel photo
A team of workers led by City Archaeologist Joe Bagley spent two days last week digging for traces of Native American artifacts at a River Street parcel that is slated to become an urban farm.
The lot at 255 River St. is an open field that sits in front of what used to be a caretaker’s home for a long-defunct hospital that is now the Foley Senior Residences. Before work was to begin to plant crops on the site, Bagley and his team were called upon to investigate traces of human history from before the colonial settlements that transformed the land starting in the 1600s.
It only took a few hours to find evidence of “native creations,” which is the term for artifacts preferred by the descendants of the Massachusett tribe.
Bagley, who lives nearby on Mattapan’s Manchester Street, said he has had his eyes on the site for a long time due to its archaeological potential.
City Archaeologist Joe Bagley made careful notes on the conditions at one of the pits. Seth Daniel photo
“We already have found plenty,” Bagley told The Reporter during a visit to the site last Thursday after two days of work. “We definitely have a native site here. We have not really dug anywhere in Boston yet and not found a native site. But we really flagged this site because of a number of reasons. The flat terrain nearby the [Neponset] river is high probability for being a native site.
“We are also halfway between Lower Mills and Mattapan,” he continued. “Lower Mills had the waterfall and members of the Neponset band living there, and Mattapan Square is a fording area for crossing the river. We are exactly halfway between.”
On arrival last Tuesday, the first step for the team was to set up a grid pattern over the field. Bagley and his staff – with help from a small team of volunteers – flagged about 35 pits, each about four feet deep and square, to dig up. Those on the dig carefully removed the soil, going through different layers marked A (topsoil, often disturbed), B (ancient soils that have been covered over and contain most finds), and C (the subsoil that pre-dates human activity, about four feet down, made up of glacial river deposits).
Soils are extracted inch by inch and put through a “sifter” where staff and volunteers leave no stone unturned. In between the occasional button, old pieces of glass, and – on Thursday – a very old thimble, crews look for tools, “flakes,” and any other native creations.
City Archaeologist Joe Bagley dumped some of the excavated soils into the sifter. Seth Daniel photo
What might look like a common stone to the untrained eye, in some cases could turn out to be a “chip” or “flake” broken off hundreds of years ago during the forming of a spear tip or a knife.
Some of what the diggers found was packed inside numerous, meticulously labeled plastic bags. “These are little pieces of stone flakes that chipped off when a native person was making a stone tool; one of the Massachusett people,” Bagley said while displaying several flakes estimated to be more than 400 years old.
“We don’t know how old they are exactly because while we can date the tool they were making, we usually can’t date the chips. It’s kind of like dating sawdust; you know something was being made but you don’t know what…This is how people worked the stone into things like spear points, arrowheads, and knives.”
Most of the flakes found were made of Blue Hill Rhyolite stone – a type of stone ideal for sharp tools that was sourced exclusively from quarries in Quincy and Milton. Another type, called Mattapan banded Rhyolite, is quite different and found almost exclusively at a nearby quarry on Cookson Street that still exists and is in the process of being declared a Boston Landmark.
Volunteers Jennifer Jones and Alison Campbell sifted through rocks and other items at the River Street dig site. Seth Daniel photo
“This is a pretty intact piece of rhyolite that hasn’t seen a lot of exposure so it’s probably on the younger side as far as when it was made,” Bagley said, displaying a piece about the size of a thumbnail. “It’s a fragment of a stone tool, perhaps a fragment of a scraper…We can’t date this one unfortunately, but I would say it’s closer to the arrival of the Europeans rather than the glacier just because of the lack of weathering. It’s another piece of the Massachusett native history right here.”
The stone is also treasured for making sharp tools, with a distinctive reddish purple when it first comes off the rock. After it weathers it develops striping that is a residual of the lava flows that formed it millions of years ago.
Among those helping to make the finds are staff members Lauryn Sharpe, Sarah Keklak, and Nadia Kline, and accompanying them are volunteers chosen on a first-come, first-serve basis. Spots are advertised to an e-mail list and, Bagley joked, they are like “Beyoncé tickets” because they are in high demand.
“People really want to volunteer with us,” he said. “Some have been here on digs for many years. Some are here for the first time. We have a great demand and that’s awesome.”
Jennifer Jones was on site last week participating in her first dig with Bagley’s team, but by no means was it her first archaeological experience. She said she had worked on professional digs in her native England many times. “I’m pretty used to digging up Medieval English stuff,” she noted with a laugh.
Jean Woy. who has been volunteering with the crew for six or seven years, said while her background is in history, but she always wanted to pursue archaeology.
“It’s really fascinating to me the idea of being able to uncover how these people that lived a long time ago were living,” she said. “You can see they had the same problems we do today, but they solved them differently.”
Lab Manager Sarah Keklak showed off the piece of Mattapan banded Rhyolite, the neighborhood’s unique, ancient stone that was a prized resource for making tools and weapons many hundreds of years ago. Seth Daniel photo
By Thursday, the team hadn’t found any major artifacts, leading Bagley to believe that the site was likely used more as a pass-through location.
“We’re not seeing a large village, but it could be a place used ceremonially,” he said. “They might have went there and used it a lot, but it’s not the kind of place you would leave things around. It could have been a layover area, too.”
All of the items found and deemed of interest were to be transported back to a laboratory to be cleaned and studied more carefully.
