A New view of an old Circle - Post one on Stonehenge

Back in 1983 I was asked to work on the construction of a Stonehenge monument to be built on the campus of what is now Missouri University of Science and Technology. The new Chancellor of the campus, Dr. Joseph Marchello, had helped establish the Center for ArcheoAstronomy at the University of Maryland. He had wanted to build a Stonehenge, and we had just developed a new way of cutting rock with high-pressure water, and had contacts with the Georgia Granite Association as a result. The monument, which ultimately consisted of 55 different stones, was designed by Dr. Joseph Senne, who was then Chair of the Civil Engineering Department on campus. But to understand why we built ours, one has to understand why the original was built, on Salisbury Plain in the UK, some 5,000 years ago. And this discussion has been helped by the new book “Stonehenge – A New Understanding” by Mike Parker Pearson, discussing the recent Stonehenge Riverside Project.

Figure 1. Location of the original Stonehenge (Google Earth)

Although there are legends that it was built by the Druids, they actually came after the circles had been built, and it should be remembered that, when the Romans came to the UK 2,000 years ago Stonehenge was already over 2,500 years old.

Figure 2. Romans versus Druids – the Roman version

In looking back on that period remember that the history was written by the Romans and that they had to justify their invasion. Thus the picture that they paint of British society at the time is colored by those needs, and their image of Druids as backward painted savages is unlikely to be close to reality.

But why was there a need for these circles? Well back some 50,000 years ago mankind had migrated out of Africa and slowly spread through Europe and Asia. But as they spread they originally retained their cultural structure as hunter-gatherers.

Figure 3. The migration of humanity from Africa into Europe and Asia (National Geographic DNA project)

They reached Spain and Portugal as Cro-Magnon man, but were still largely hunting and subsistence gathering at that time. Such groups are small, typically, as one sees with the Hatzabe in Africa today, they number around 20 individuals.

Figure 4. The Hatzabe a family group of about 20 individuals.

The group size is similar with the Sami in Scandinavia, families that still follow the herds of reindeer as they have done for millennia.

Figure 5. A Sami family group of reindeer herders from Northern Scandinavia

Such tribes (including the Bakhtiari of Iran that Bronowski documented in “The Ascent of Man”) are migrant, and do not have time for much other than staying alive. But, with time, the culture changed and people began to farm. This change began around 12,000 years ago, likely in the Middle East. It was not until 6,500 years ago (4,000 BC) that trees began to be cleared and farms established in Southern England.

One of the advantages of farming is that the tribe does not have to move continuously to sustain itself. Cronon, in Changes in the Land, notes that in non-agricultural Maine the population was sustained at around 41 persons per hundred square miles. With the beginning of agriculture further south in New England (pre-European arrival) the native peoples could sustain 287 people in a similar area. More intense development of crops and the domestication of animals followed, leading to larger and more closely knit communities.

But there is one problem with the switch to agriculture on an increasing scale, one needs to know when to plant the crops. And while initially this was likely imitative of nature, over time the tribes needed to develop a calendar.

Lying by the fire and staring up at the stars to work on the idea Neolithic Man was living in what we now call the end of the Stone Age. And they noticed that at different times of the year the moon lay at different points in the sky. And so they started to plot these positions, after a while they noticed that there were grooves on some of the local rocks, left from earlier glaciation, that aligned with the positions of the moon at mid-winter and mid-summer.

Figure 6. Grooves in the rock near Stonehenge (Dr. Parker Pearson ibid)

This led on to marking the positions of the moon (and possibly also some of the stars as was the practice in native tribes in America). These markings were made more permanent as they were more confident of their positioning, through the use of wooden poles. (Note that there is a similar though more primitive wooden circle at Cahokia in Illinois dating at around a thousand years ago).

Figure 7. Circle of wooden poles – the UK Woodhenge (Dr. Parker Pearson)

The village grew into the town of Durrington Walls, with wooden houses, which have been recently excavated to show the yellow-painted clay floors, and the location of beds, dressers and other wooden furniture.

Figure 8. Artist’s rendition of the town of Durrington Walls (Dr. Parker Pearson)

With confidence, and as the calendar became more reliably used, so the wooden poles were replaced with a more permanent set of bluestone columns that had been brought to the site up the river Avon.

Figure 9. An early stone circle – Bluestonehenge- on the banks of the Avon. (Dr. Parker Pearson)

There is a little controversy over what happened next, but it has been suggested that around this time a new set of folk, now known as the Beaker people, because they used clay pots with a spout (beaker) moved into the region. They had one critical difference to the earlier site inhabitants, in that they worshipped the sun, rather than the moon. Thus the old calendar would not work. But up where the grooves cut into the stone, they had set four stones (the Station Stones) into the ground in a rectangle to mark the position of mid-summer and midwinter moonrise. If you rotated around the stones ninety degrees, then these poles still marked the two days, but now they did it for the sun’s positions. This could not have been a co-incidence, and so the study of calendars proceeded, but at the new site, further up the hill at the current Stonehenge.

Figure 10. Alignment of the Station Stones (Dr. Parker Pearson)

And on a passing note, as I once mentioned in Nature, and Rodney Castelden noted in “The Making of Stonehenge” the rocks were likely hauled into place with oxen, which might be why the roads are so wide).

Figure 11. Oxen hauling the stones to the site (Rodney Castleden ibid)

The first major construction at the Stonehenge site was the surrounding ditch and mound of rock (which is a relatively soft chalk that can be excavated with antler picks) with a series of small pits (some of which have been found to contain human remains) set within the ring.

There has been discussion as to whether this was a ceremonial burial ground for high-ranking individuals. In much the same way as Bruce Bourque has noted in “The Swordfish Hunters” discussing the Red Paint People of Maine, the small number of burials, relative to the size of the local population and the length of time this existed, means that this could only be a special place and rite. So though it might be where high class folk were buried (as with Westminster Abbey) it had other uses, which was to develop the calendar.

Over the years a number of different circles, with a variety of pole positions, were tried. For a while the 28 and a half stones of the Sarsen Ring had favor, but the last stone circles they put in had nineteen stones (probably taken from the Bluestone ring at the bottom of the hill). Then they stopped. They had a calendar.

Figure 12. Part of the bluestone ring of smaller stones set within the Sarsen Ring at Stonehenge. The Heel Stone can be seen further back from the main circle. (Landscape Perception)

But why nineteen? Well nineteen times nineteen is 361. Add the four days when, in the Hyperborean calendar, “time stood still”, which have come down as the Celtic feast days Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh, and you have a remarkable resemblance to the 365 days of the year. The problem was solved for a couple of thousand years.

Until, of course, those pesky Romans showed up, and made us work with months of 28, and 30 and 31 days. Herumph!!

I’ll talk about the Building of the MS&T Stonehenge next time!.

The Red Paint People, Doggerland and my DNA.

Over the last couple of months I have been putting up the occasional post on my own family tree, as it is becoming defined by DNA analysis, and at the same time have been looking at some of the early arrivals of Indians in Maine and the North East American continent. (My interest in the latter was initiated by the question of when Europeans first arrived on the continent in enough numbers to influence facial features of the locals).

Two weeks ago I was fortunate to be able to attend a lecture by Bruce Bourque, the Curator of Archaeology at Maine State Museum, and the authority on the Red Paint People, of whom I have written earlier with a follow-up post on their travels. His talk, and the book he just recently released (The Swordfish Hunters) provides much more detail on a people that have largely been neglected by “the archaeologists of Harvard,” who have tended to disregard significant developments this far north of Boston.

The Red Paint People are also called “the Moorehead Phase”, after Warren Moorehead, who first identified them as the “Red Paint” people, because of their custom of burying red ocher with the bodies in their cemeteries. They flourished in a small part of Maine, and their cemeteries have been found along the banks of local rivers. There is, however considerable evidence that they harvested fish and sea-food (their cemeteries have been found in large shell middens), with a peculiarity that they also hunted, ate and used the bones and rostra (the “sword”) of local swordfish. The latter, in particular, was used to provide a stiffened mount behind the harpoon and spear tips used in hunting. They appear to be the first to hunt swordfish, which would have been a dangerous prey for early Holocene man, since they have a nasty habit of attacking the boats of those who have just stabbed them with a harpoon.

Figure 1. Red Paint Cemeteries in North-East America (The Swordfish Hunters)

The book is a fascinating story of detective work, and archaeology as it builds a picture of a people that began around 5,000 years ago and suddenly disappeared around 3,800 years ago. Dr. Bourque points to evidence that it does not fit within an overall unified culture which has been described as the Maritime Archaic, but rather stands on its own, and emerges from the “Small Stemmed Point” tradition that preceded it. But is totally separate from the Ceramic period that follows.

One of the intriguing parts of the story lies in the thousand-mile link with the Ramah Peninsula in Labrador, that I discussed in a previous post, and Dr. Bourque also points to close similarities between the findings in Maine, and those at the Port au Choix site. One identifying characteristic lies in the development of stone gouges, for use in hollowing out the inside of dugout canoes.

Figure 2. A Stone Gouge from Maine, and an artist’s rendition of how it would be hafted. (The Swordfish Hunters).

The gouges, as the book argues, show that the Red Paint Peoples were building substantial canoes and boats around 4,000 years ago, that were substantial enough for voyages of a thousand miles, and that this would also make them viable for use in harpooning swordfish (an art in itself as the book illustrates).

The climate change around the time that this culture was flourishing in Maine is not seriously discussed in the book, but I think that it is worth looking at, in context, because it ties in a little with what was happening across the Atlantic, where the culture that built Stonehenge had moved into Britain.

Figure 3. Climate swings in the Northern Hemisphere over the past 10,000 years (the Holocene) (Consulting Geologist)

The significance of these temperature variations is often significantly discounted as climate scientists today would rather emphasize the point of the effects imposed by man, rather than the natural effects we cannot control. Yet the higher temperatures that did exist, even as recently as the last (Medieval) Warming Period are evidenced, for example, by the recent uncovering of an Eskimo village which has been buried under a glacier for the past 500 years. The inhabiting tribe of Yup’ik Eskimo lived, among other things, on caribou and lived at Quinhagak in Alaska. Without the protective ice cap that has covered the site from the time that the Yup’ik left there at the beginning of the Little Ice Age, the site is now rapidly being eroded into the Bering Sea (a fate that is similarly threatening the sites in Maine, where coastal erosion and sea level changes have covered most of the Red Paint People’s locations). But it indicates that we are only now reaching the temperatures at that site that prevailed in the Medieval Warming Period.

The Red Paint People lived at the beginning of what is now referred to as the Minoan Warming Period. And, from data obtained from the Greenland Ice Cores, it is possible to note a couple of facts about the time that the tribe appears to have vanished. First, if the temperatures, as derived from the Ice cores recovered from Greenland are examined in a little more detail:

Figure 4. Temperatures in the region over the last 5,000 years (from the Greenland GISP2 Ice core)

Perhaps more to the point, if the extent of sea ice at the time is considered (from the same source) it fell to an historic low during the Minoan.

Figure 5. Sea Ice extent over the Holocene (The Ice Chronicles ) (Note the plot has been flipped, relative to the original, in order to conform to the consistency of showing the older period to the left of the plot in the rest of the post).

With this considerable warming the ice retreated from the shores of Greenland, and it became an even more hospitable place that it was at the time almost 3,000 years later when Erik the Red came calling. This warming had another consequence, because it led to a steady rise in the levels of the sea. This is shown in the book as it affects Maine, important since it shows how the shoreline dwellings from the period have since been inundated.

Figure 6. Sea levels off the coast of Maine over the Holocene (The Swordfish Hunters)

But in Europe that sea rise from the beginning of the Holocene had another consequence. It flooded the land-bridge (known as Doggerland) between what became the isle of Britain and the continent.

Within the British Isles, by 4,000 BP the country had been colonized for about a thousand years by the arrival of an agricultural movement that displaced the earlier hunter-gatherers and, in turn. rapidly changed from a “slash and burn” land clearance into the development of a “celtic arrangement of fields. Colin Burgess in "The Age of Stonehenge" has noted that the settlements towards the end of that transition were already being constructed defensively.

A more recent unmarked burial pit at Fengate contained three disarticulated burials and one, crouched, the latter with a leaf-shaped arrowhead still sticking between the eighth and ninth ribs.

The warmer clime was conducive to the spread of agriculture and an increasing density of population. The cutting of the land bridge, and the slow flooding of what later became the Dogger Bank, in the North Sea, had a personal consequence.

Figure 7. The location of Doggerland about 7000 BP (Bryony Coles via doggerland)

My Y-chromosome has been designated as R1b1b2a1a1d*, which is a variety of Celt, that, as I have mentioned in an earlier post, had come down from Cro-Magnon man. The analysis that has evolved over the past few years (apparently starting at 23andme suggests that this a “Freisian” variety of Celt and there is a body of thought moving to the conclusion that they were the inhabitants of Doggerland that were driven to Britain when the final inundation occurred around 5500 years ago, just before the first circles at Stonehenge were constructed. (And here I now discover that maybe I wasn’t the first of my lineage to work on a Stonehenge).

The first circles at Stonehenge were developed about 5,000 years ago (at the left side of Figure 4). But around 2150 BC or some 4000 BP the Beaker People arrived. In contrast with those, maybe us, who had first developed the site and were moon worshipers, they worshiped the sun. What made the Stonehenge site become what it did was that the simple markers already there to align critical lunar phases could, by moving around the circle ninety degrees, also align to the major solar alignments at mid-winter, mid-summer etc. The ruling elites of the time became more powerful, and with the warmer climes helping sustain agricultural production, society became more static. And the more powerful had enough manpower available to develop, over the next millennium or so, the full glory that became Stonehenge. They also grew into the Wessex Culture with its elaborate and rich graves.

The Beaker People were Celts and still, at the beginning of this time, used stone axes and flint-shaped arrowheads. But copper daggers are found even in the earliest graves and this was the time where the culture was moving into the Bronze Age in Britain, some time after it had developed elsewhere in Europe.

Given that the Red Paint People were aware of native copper deposits, (and were starting to make small ornaments with them) had they known of the metal forming traditions developing in Europe then metal objects would have shown up in the graves. They did not, and even to the time of Champlain stone tools were in use.

So it is logical to conclude that seafaring though the cultures were on both sides of the Atlantic they did not communicate at this time, at least not well enough to teach metal craft, at a time when it might have been easier to travel, from one side of the Atlantic to the other. On the other hand, it might be possible to conjecture an explanation for the long and narrow bayonet points which Dr. Bourque points out as a significant feature of Red Paint burials. He notes that these are too weak to have any great utilitarian value in society, because they were made of stone. He therefore suggests that they had only a ceremonial aspect that has been lost. But it could be that they were an attempt to copy the spear heads that were beginning to be developed in Britain at the time, but which were made utilitarian only by being made of metal. And that would suggest some form of communication between the two societies.

There remain a couple of additional thoughts, both about the ability of early societies such as these to travel long distances, and the mysterious disappearance of whole societal segments. But they arise in events in Greenland that happened during the Medieval Warming Period; the migration of the Thule from Alaska to Northern Greenland in 1000 AD, and the abandonment of the Western Settlement of the Viking in Greenland. Since this is a different time period I will therefore leave those topics to a subsequent post.

Looking Indian and Red Paint Peoples - additional thoughts

Before moving on to the next period of possible European:Native American interaction, there are a couple of things to add to the narrative that has been compiled to date. First I had a short discussion with the lady behind the desk, while visiting the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor. I had commented on their lack of identification of the Red Paint People, and she commented that they felt that using the term diminished the tribe, and made it easier to disassociate current Wobanaki (the collective tribe of North-East America) from their ancestors, and thus diminish any political clout they might have. Having picked up Frederick Wiseman’s Book “Reclaiming the Ancestors” in the museum shop, it provided additional information relative to my last post, and so I will return to the Wobanaki issue in a minute.

But the second point that I wanted to touch on was one made by Senator Scott Brown, in his first debate with Elizabeth Warren in this election cycle. He made the comment

“Professor Warren claimed that she was a Native American, a person of color, and as you can see, she’s not,” said Brown. . . . . .

Now this is where this series began. Because what does an Eastern American Indian (as the Cherokee and Delaware were) look like? I rather think that the good Senator is being either somewhat perhaps racist, or perhaps just ignorant? For the reality is that the average Native American of the Eastern seaboard look like the average American. The lady behind the counter, who from our conversation is likely Wobanaki had the appearance of a typical American teenager/college student. The five basket weavers whose work is featured in the museum at present are Indian but look no different from your average American. In fact the second from the left looks a little like the good Senator.

Figure 1. Indian Basketweavers whose superb work is on display at the Abbe Museum (Abbe Museum)

So Tsk! Tsk! Senator, perhaps you ought to have a good look at your constituents. (Note that this comment has now been picked up at Talking Points Memo).

To return to the Wobanaki, and Professor Wiseman’s book. (He is incidentally Wobanaki himself). One of the premises on which the series to date has developed lies on the assumption that there was communication between European and some of the first populations of America (the First Nations) possibly dating from the time period of the PaleoIndians, and also possibly at the time of the Red Paint People. Dr. Wiseman gives a First Nations view of the topic.

In addressing the first of these points, Professor Wiseman noted that at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, PaleoIndians were using stone obtained from Ramah Bay in Northern Labrador. The significance of that, at the time I first read it, escaped me. But the distance from Ramah Bay to Maine is about a thousand miles and at the time of the use of the stone there was the remnant of a glacier still sitting over most of Eastern Canada, down to the coast.

Figure 2. Suggested trade route from Maine to Ramah Bay. (Google Earth and Frederick Wiseman.

The upshot being that the First Nations had seagoing craft, and that the “technology” therefore existed to allow communication along the lower edge of the ice sheets and glaciers, from America to Europe.

Figure 3. Alternate route to Ramah Bay (Stephen Loring via Georgiabeforepeople )

Wiseman suggests that the boats were hide covered, much as are the current umiaks used by the Inuit to move groups and their belongings over distance. Although if they were venturing long distances, I imagine they might have provided some cover for the passangers, and a variant of these has been around for millennia.

One addition that Wiseman brings to the cemeteries of the Red Paint People is that, in some cases the bodies were cremated. He cites the burials near Amoskeag Falls in New Hampshire, and also notes that as the culture moved from Early Archaic to Middle so the groups, which had originally only been the 20-30 individuals, the characteristic size of hunter-gatherer groups now grew. With the fish and marine harvests larger groups came together, and were able to construct fish weirs across the rivers, giving a much greater harvest, for less ultimate effort. Larger weirs use wooden stakes to guide the fish into the traps, while smaller ones, such as the Allman fish weir, were constructed of large stones. The weir acts to guide the fish into a trap, usually made of net or wood. The oldest of these is the Sebasticook Lake Fish Weir(pdf). When the larger weirs were placed in rivers such as the Penobscot, Wiseman notes that it might take perhaps more than a hundred man-days to construct the weir, since the staves had first to be shaped, and then held in place with stones.

Figure 4. Stones arranged across a stream to build a weir or guide so that the fish have to follow the narrow channel to the upper left of the stream, where traps can be set to catch them. (National Park Service)

I used the example of the Allman weir because it is a relatively shallow construction and was re-constructed by just one man. The more conventional weirs are made of wood, and are set into the river bed, albeit in roughly the same shape, but require much greater labor to construct, with the advantage that, where the waters are tidal, the yield can also be much greater. The stakes would then be connected by a wattle (woven branch) construction to direct the fish. Miller notes that the Sebasticook Lake weir was made up of some 630 wooden stakes. Wiseman notes that single hunter-gatherer groups, which might consist of up to 6 “families” would “work” over an area that might extend from 3 to 19 miles in distance, using different regions as the seasons changed. Moving to the construction of weirs with their provision of longer-lasting food supplies then became a pre-cursor to the subsequent shift into an agronomic lifestyle.

One additional facet of stone tool design also appears in the region during the time of the Red Paint People, and that is the ulu knife. These probably originated in the Inuit communities several thousand years ago and have a distinctive shape. Their presence in Maine confirms the likelihood of communication between the First Nations in the lower 48, and the Inuit who were living along the Arctic Coast.

Figure 5. Modern Ulu knife shape (Ulu factory )

The great warming that occurred during the time of the Red Paint People, taken with their increasing development of larger communities, and deeper water fishing, leads Wiseman to suggest that rather than Europeans coming to America, it is equally possible that exploring Wobanaki were the ones to cross the Atlantic, and brought back as, perhaps, a bride someone with the X variant in the mtDNA that then began its spread west. It is an interesting point of view, and one that is shared by the Curator at the Penobscot Museum at Lake Isle.

The direction of the communicating vessels will come up again in later posts.

The Native American Peoples of the Red Paint/Cemetery Complex/Maritime Archaic/Moorehead Phase and the Maasai

Browsing through Howard Terpening’s “Tribute to the Plains People”, his “Passing into Womanhood” caught, and held my eye. Not just from the theme, nor the way he creates a realistic sense of what might be. No, it was the small bowl of red ochre that sits by the mother’s feet, and the red paint that covers the young maiden as she moves through the ceremony.

Howard Terpening “Passing into Womanhood,” 1989.

Back in the time that Europeans arrived in the Americas for the last and culture-changing time, the first Native Americans that they met wore little more than a coating of red paint, the Beothuk, being one such example. It is a tradition that Robert Griffing has used in his paintings of the period.

2. Face painted warrior (After Griffing – Logan’s Revenge)

The use of red ochre – mixed with or applied over a grease is not, however, novel to the American tribes of the more recent past. 80,000 years or more ago South African archaeologists believe that the native inhabitants of the Blombos Cave were using red ochre for body paint.

The tradition has descended to its use by the Maasai in Kenya to the present time. So when did the tradition arrive in the Americas? It does not seem to have been a tradition with those that came across from Siberia via Beringia, and thence into Western America.

Instead those known as the Red Paint People now more scientifically referred to as the Maritime Archaic, appeared in the New England and Atlantic regions of Canada between 6,000 and 3,000 BP (years before the present). They first came to prominence when a local farmer turned up pockets of red ochre, and it was then discovered, first that there were polished stone tools within the pod of paint, and then further discoveries also found human remains, showing that the bodies had been buried with pots of ochre in the grave. Paeo-Indians are believed to have lived in Maine since around 11,000 BP,(pdf), with the change from the chipped flint to ground stone tools occurring with the transition to the Archaic Period. With that tradition also came the use of the ochre paint, and the initial naming of the culture as the “Red Paint” people. The ochre was generated by grinding local haematite ore. As well as being called the Maritime Archaic, the culture is also referred to as the Moorehead Phase. Cemeteries have been found only between the Kennebec and St John’s rivers in Maine. They include the Turner Farm site in Maine, and the Blue Hill Falls site with the Nevin shell midden.

Figure 3. Cemeteries if the “Red Paint” People in Maine. (Massachusetts Archaeological Society )

However, as investigators have looked for and found other sites, they have, to date, established that the earliest site was at L’Anse Amour site in Labrador. The site was occupied from 9,000 to 2,000 years ago, but the buried individual was a child laid to rest some 7,500 years ago.

The body had been covered with red ochre, wrapped in a shroud of skins or birch bark, and placed face down, head pointed west, in a large pit 1.5 metres deep. Evidence also indicates the use of ceremonial fires and the cooking and consumption of food. Offerings were made of tools and weapons made of stone and bone. These included a walrus tusk, a harpoon head, paint stones and a bone whistle.

. The burial grounds at Port au Choix in Newfoundland lie fairly close to this coastal site, and have the advantage of also including residual material from the nearby community. The site is younger than that at L’Anse Amour, dating to around 2000 to 1200 B.C.

More recently Red Paint burials have been found in Wisconsin, dating from between 1,000 and 400 BC. The later dates are about the time of the shift to the Early Woodland period of American history, when pottery was introduced. Grave sites have also been found in Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana and Ohio. So it would appear that, as with the Clovis Points, the concept started in the East and spread Westward.

Where did the idea come from? Well starting with the African culture cited above, Europeans have been burying people with ocher paint from the time of the “Red Lady of Paviland Cave.” That skeleton was, as it turned out, actually that of a young man, dating from around 30,000 years ago, back when there were still glaciers in the UK. It is the oldest “Modern human” skeleton found in the United Kingdom.

Given that, of one puts this chronology into sequence, this gives an African-European-Eastern American progression, there is an implication (through the L’Anse Amour connection) that, as with the Clovis Point, there was a European connection to North America along the Northern perimeter of the Atlantic.

L’Anse Amour also introduces funeral monuments to North America with the suggestion that it took at least a week for the local hunting band to build the mound, using local stone and boulders.

Figure 4. Artist’s Impression of the L’Anse Amour burial (Canadian Encyclopedia )

The mounds that followed, moving down into Maine seemed to be more incidental, since some of the burials were found in the large shell middens that were built as the community harvested and consumed the local shellfish over many years. At the Turner Farm site, built around 5,000 years ago, the shells are mainly of clams with the advantage that the shells reduced the acidity of the local soil, so that bones could be preserved.

This site has the oldest dates for human occupancy in Maine.

Two reasons have been proposed to explain the lack of older coastal sites. The first is that the sites were drowned or eroded as sea levels rose during the past 11,000 years (Sanger and Kellogg 1989; Kellogg 1995). The second is that the early Gulf of Maine was not highly productive, a result of low tidal amplitude and poor circulation, and that there were scant resources to support people in a maritime adaptation (Sanger and Belknap 1987). Evidence for the first scenario may be found in the rare artifacts that have been dragged up by fishing boats in the Gulf of Maine and associated estuaries (e.g. Spiess, Bourque, and Cox 1983; Wilson 1997). The second reason is much harder to confirm.

One conclusion from Maine coastal research is that the timing of the earliest visible occupation varies significantly along the coast, a result of localized rates of sea level rise and differential erosion rates (Sanger and Kellogg 1989). Another factor contributing to the pattern is that certain locations only became available for habitation when sea level had risen enough to make access possible and to create clam flats.

Research conducted to date shows that the oldest extant Maine shell middens are in Penobscot and Frenchman Bays, where soft-shell clams were procured as early as 5,000 B.P. In Casco Bay, the earliest dated occupation, about 4,000 B.P., was associated with oyster shells at the base of a large midden on Great Moshier Island (Yesner 1984). Basal deposits in the oldest Casco Bay shell middens are routinely composed of oyster and quahog (Loomis and Young 1912; Sanger and Kellogg 1989; Yesner 1983), species indicative of warmer waters and a lack of intense sedimentation. A decline in the rate of sea level rise, increasing sedimentation, and colder surface temperatures have been proposed to account for intensive coastal settlement and the formation of soft-shell clam middens after 2,000 B.P. in Casco Bay (Yesner 1983).

Interestingly the shell midden site at Taft’s Point at West Gouldsboro, ME, also included iron pyrite associated with the fire pits, the use of the pyrite as a fire starter is also considered a marker for the culture. The pyrite provided an early version of the steel which, when struck with a flint, was the source of sparks for the flint-lock rifle in later years, and historically provided the spark which was caught on tinder to provide the basis for a fire. Otzi, the remains of a man found in the Alps who lived 5,300 years ago used flint and pyrite as his fire starter.

At Blue Hill, which lies at the mouth of the Penobscot River, the Nevin shell midden was the first to be found that included human remains. Remains of a total of 19 separate individuals have been identified at the site, which covered the period from 4,500 to 3,800 BP, at which time the culture seemed to “disappear.” However shell middens continued to grow as coastal settlements continued to consume the local bounty, and the use of ochre in graves seemed to move West, as noted above. The change in cultures appears to be marked with the introduction of pottery.

Was this assimilation, or, as with later tribes, did the growth of the population cause the original inhabitants to “move on” as stronger cultures displaced them? We may never know, but – to return to the original motive for this short series – it does provide another point at which European customs appeared in an American setting, suggesting, from the chronology, that there may have been a European arrival perhaps 5,000 to 6,000 years or so ago. UPDATE The date is roughly about the time that there was a culture change in Britain, with the arrival of the Celts, the change from a worship of the moon to worshiping of the sun, and the start of construction of the stone circles, the most famous of which was Stonehenge. And, of course, there were druids and body painting, although, as those who remember the movie Braveheart will recall, the paint was wode, which is blue, rather than red.