all i really appreciated i had i had little doubt that there would be this many or a little hope that there would be this many people on such a gorgeous late summer day thank you all very much for coming  i am the state archaeologist and with the division first court preservation and combined with my colleagues at the agency of transportation every year we sponsor a month long program of events workshops lectures and in the back i'm only cry and we've made great strides over the years thanks in part to her and the other coordinators this year's coordinator brett knows from want to give all the credit to them as well so i was here in march and i gave somewhat of a general overview of the monarchy ology concentrating a little bit on shit and county but doing the broad strokes through time and can always begin and i was asked back is known or at least thought to be known about archaeology in the region certainly some of our most important archaeological sites that we hang our hat on in this region were known from the inner veil but and one of the things i will note at the outset is there is a remarkable wealth of information about the environment about the hydrology the forest communities the wetlands the indigenous species and  it's there is a look who know in tying that back to the ancient past in archaeology so this talk is sort of reinvigorate for me a long term project to synthesize this data about the ancient past twenty four all of that and make it better for all of us so with that we'll just get going with lisa brooks so i just noticed her book is in the is in the book room and i might very well buy it at the conclusion of this talk and she summarizes what one knock or interval in abductee is the fertile bulls between mountain ranges that were capable of sustaining many families who gathered the forming permanent communities in interval is an old term that's somewhat been superseded by other terms and yet we still use it intermittently here in vermont and you can find them on old maps again talking into these valleys between mountains the interval itself is relatively recent geologically and hydra logically twelve thousand or thirteen thousand years ago to after ten thousand years ago the see delta was built out through all the out wash of sediment left over by the glaciers and ground out from the mountains in other areas so that when you ski deltas actually very recent within the last ten thousand years or so and was a build out of all of the sediment washing in from interior margins and left over from the champlain sea the when you ski river itself whose name resides at the top when off to coke or onion river although as it flows through the delta it's quite recent it is a very ancient river that predates  the next few slides i've borrowed from the lake champlain basin program and there are various reports they do remarkable jobs with graphics and and i couldn't regenerate it better if i tried so i'm borrowing them but here what we have and you can see it's cut off a little bit at the bottom but here what we have is the extent of the lake champlain basin watershed it is absolutely enormous compared to most equivalent lakes and in fact you can see here this it's cut off but you can see here that over ninety percent of the water that flows that comprises lake champlain flows from surrounding watersheds or subagent basins and that the watershed ratio of lake to watershed is eighteen to one whereas the great lakes is two to one so we have eighteen times as much water or actually nine times as much water flowing into lake champlain from surrounding basins than than a typical lake like the great lakes would have this obviously has implications in the modern area for phosphorous load and other things because such a vast array of streams and feeder streams tributaries and major rivers feed into lake champlain but it also meant in the native american and early historic past that all of these various and quite extensive systems were tied back into the central place the lake champlain you could always follow many of these rivers back  and get to the lake or streams and in particular here is that when you see river watershed a very large watershed within the lake champlain basin system just zooming in a little bit further six major rivers and tributaries feed the when you ski just to zoom in here again an extensive system and all of those eventually pass through this intervale region on its way out to the lake so we are at the base of this system now in preparation for this talk i grabbed recently generated lidar of a portion  here it's a little bit difficult to see in this light and i do apologize because a couple tiles came in and i need to talk to them on center for geographic information about this where they they  and make available for free all of this data but certain tiles came in with tree cover here and then certain tiles without and i got them from the same store so i'm not sure what's up but in any case i thought i would leave it in rather than bending over backwards so you can get a comparison of what it's like when you have lidar which picks up the tree cover and if you zoom then you could get even individual trees again lidar stands for laser light ranging and detection  it is flown from a plane and shoots lasers to the ground at you know roughly half a million times a second and those bounce back or a large percentage of them bounce back they calculate the time in the distance between the bounce back and they're able to then much like radar sooner get a map of the topography but what is wonderful about lidar over and above its accuracy which is generally less than a meter from a plane is that enough of those pulses get down to the forest floor even through the trees that then in post processing you can say well these aren't the ground these are trees these dots and factor them out essentially removing the tree cover of any given area so this is a boon for archaeologists because it's essentially electronically or through software move removing the forest to see what the bare earth is like and so in one of the derived products is often called bare lidar so here you can see these tiles where all the tree cover in vegetation is removed and will be returning to these slides throughout the talk but i do want to draw your attention to here's  it picks up some speed and certainly picks up volume as it flows out toward the lake just another image of the miniscule river in travail area and i have to give credit to both p thomas the eighteen thirty eight hundred sixty nine eight hundred ninety four and then these are all overlaid and you can see the vast movement of the river in only roughly two two hundred one hundred eighty years now archaeologically and will show this we have seen this through time going back at least three or four thousand years but it is quite a component of this interval system when the northern connector was built they borrowed a load of sediment out of one area to area to make the road which formed a sort of pond but it was essentially dead because not knowing anything at the time about wetland or water body regeneration the sides were too steep and so no no vegetation could really catch hold and reform a functioning system so the the e p a and the army corps in the early two thousand decided that they needed to taper the sides more of this pond in order to regenerate vibrant and communities but because they were going to potentially intact  impact archaeological resources of which i was a part at the time went out to do some soil profiles to see what it was like so here you can see this is roughly five feet down we're cleaning the profile to try to get the mapping of sediment through time trying to find archaeological sites but at the end what we saw is this series of flood zones major floods you can see separated through time and space and though you can't see the words down there at the very bottom of this we radio carbon dated a log eight hundred eighty so all of the sediment is post eight hundred eighty so massive massive flood sediment deposition movement of the river the blues are between eighteen zero two and eight hundred fifty seven the reds are between i can't tell but sometime after that and then the greens are oxbows abandon price prior to eighteen o two and you can see these are probably quite ancient but all the vast movement since that time and why was this well certainly there's a variety of factors but probably the biggest one alerted me to this yesterday when i was at another vermont archaeology month event and this is a early single room schoolhouse in underhill but note the totally denuded hillside all the way in the back right down to scrub land  and this would have fed eventually through the dog into the new ski if you just imagine the sediment load and i forgot to ask county from the university of vermont consulting archaeology program about this yesterday but i do remember her doing some research on the early residents of the burlington area and talking about how the eighteen thirty flood which was probably worse than the than the one thousand nine hundred seven flood except had much less human impact because there are so much fewer people living in here but she were mad she recalled seeing a newspaper article where they thought that it was the end of the world on the intervale because the entire thing was essentially  drowned and burlington on the hill was essentially an island so remarkable and then again more recently in hurricane irene you can say here's a community farm so clearly we have a dynamic river system here near the mouth toward lake champlain and the dynamism can be certainly destructive as you probably all know here but also  enabled vast fertility particularly when these flood episodes were somewhat arrested or made farther apart in time or less severe due to forest cover and just to give you now situate you  in the native past here's a map of you know sort of the tribes at the time of early european contact and their rough approximate boundaries and here we have the western abductee right here located in this region and again returning to the interval area remarkable place not just for its fertility you know soil fertility which we'll talk about in a minute but the host of species that were able to come down here and i important for both a food source but more prominently for food and for tools beaver teeth were extremely important tools for woodworking and other forget this caribou down here i forgot to take him out but obviously moose and deer extremely important salmon you know as that where the salmon hole gets its name this would have been an important fishery in time prior to  and then this is a this is an inset zoomed in from champlain sixteen twelve map of of north america as then known particularly new france and you can see here a jerusalem artichoke that my colleague fred wiseman pointed out in an earlier publication onions here and a variety of other species including being that would have been procured by native americans again and i thought it was really great and certainly does a great job synthesizing a lot of oral history about the area so i've never met her i don't know where but i found it online and it was a great document you all are probably familiar with this quotation but for those of you aren't i will read it out i explored the intervals below the falls of said onion river and pitched my tent by a large pitch pine tree nearly opposite to an island about one and a half miles below the falls where i had observed large  sides of the river and landed for the first time i ever set foot on the fertile soil of the onion river at the lower end of the meadow now known by the name of the old fields where i discovered from my boat and opening like cleared lands i went up the open meadow where the blue joint grass was thick  till in sight of a large and lonely elm computing the open fields at fifty acres i was much pleased with this excursion promising myself one day to be the owner of that beautiful meadow and he did the allens were quite known for this but what's notable is he talks about cleared lands of at least fifty acres and subsequent generations of scholars now know that that was not natural clearing that was native american clearing for agriculture and indeed one of a series of quotations that you might not be familiar with i certainly found it sort of by happenstance last year was written by daniel charles sanders the first president of the university of vermont in eight hundred twenty eight he wrote this after he had retired called the history of the indian wars which is one of these early sort of treatises that tries to synthesize every you know  battle across north america but because he was situated in vermont one chapter was devoted to native american studies in vermont and he has these particular insights about about when you ski and eight hundred twenty eight or thereabouts indian corn fields are plainly to be seen in various parts of vermont at the intervals in burlington several hundred acres together why were found by the american settlers entirely cleared not a tree upon them the lands perfectly level the soy soil made by vernal freshets and then which there can be no richer land and then on the onion river this is more notable archaeologically if somewhat more tragic on the onion river opposite burlington the bank washed away by the by the water discovered a vast quantity of bones of various sorts and sizes for more than ten rods in extent the horns of deer were yet distinguishable in digging a few feet among several things found was the edge part of an indian iron hatchet which had been cracked and broken off at the from the whole scene throughout the thought hurried itself in the mind that this was a burying ground for the natives at a time when it was customary to bury provisions for the nourishment and instruments for defense with the bodies of the deceased when they made their journey to the country of the souls now you know that was common  stereotypical and somewhat simplistic but summary of their belief systems but nevertheless quite remarkable that in a normal native american cemetery it had this time in the night eight hundred twenty s likely washed  the river and that the iron implements mean it was quite recent in time probably you know the seventeen hundreds by the time or maybe late sixteen hundreds by the time those trade goods got into this region again a cautionary tale for archaeologists here about the resources that make yet still be here but also about the erosion that was already being caused at this time and native americans didn't haphazardly despite what you know many stereotypically said they wouldn't bury their dead and spots prone under normal conditions to media roshan rather this was probably a new phenomenon that went on  probably one of the most important reasons for the intervale for native americans in this region was the growing of corn and beans and squash in early plate by diver the general features of the new ski is that it was a primary artery of transportation and travel you know as i believe i said in the last top for those of you were here the rivers were native americans natural with which to make journeys quite quickly out into the lake and then up into the hinterlands will talk about some of those early archaeologists noted in and around the intervale things like native american potter not early archeologists early settlers and others saw things like native american pottery in and around this region but there was a very very incomplete understanding almost complete lack of understanding about how recently the native americans had occupied the intervale prior to the allens and in the early settlers so with that as background i'd like to talk about some particular sites in this area again looking at the slide are the the  red and multi colored areas get increasingly high in elevation and you can see the bottom land all almost uniformly it you know one zero five one feet just slightly above them when you see river itself and here are all of the archaeological sites we have documented in the intervale right now there are many other archaeological collections that have been sort of we've been alerted to but they don't have a location for them so while we know that a lot of people have found artifacts in the past if we can't tie them to a specific location we can only say that they're from this general area and this area was prior to my time but in the mid two thousand designated one of the few archaeological districts in vermont meaning that it has a special significance and that the sites themselves tell a cohesive story over and above the individual sites but that they they  so starting up the archaeological beginning so to speak one of the first or the first really serious documentation of the archaeological richness of the just another view here here's the used to be the carpet factory then became various other things most recently was d r trimmer mower but i've recently heard that they're going to be closing that operation unfortunately  there was a carpet factory there this had long been known informally as a place where people would stumble upon artifacts when walking along the river or fishing and and jim and the vermont archeological society and u v m did a joint excavation in the mid to late seventy's where they really uncovered you know a vast rich native american presence here primarily dating to the middle to late woodlands so between about two thousand years ago to the time of european contact with the majority of the occupations here being the middle woodland from about for the purposes of the does this discussion about two thousand years ago to about a thousand years ago here's some just interesting slides we recently scanned and a problem you know that we're facing just parents ethically is that you know this was pre digital obviously and many of the slides from these early excavations are rapidly fading and yellowing and so on trying to get some interns to come in and scan them before they are unrecognizable and you'll see some of those in a minute you can see here somewhat difficult but all of these rocks here are a vast roasting pit and you can see all the flood sediments above a post from an old structure right  and and just remarkable things came out again floodplains archaeologically are very important because a native american group will come stay at a particular site camp live and eventually they will leave and then at a certain later time the river will flood deposited a layer of sterile sediment over that then another native american group will come later and so through the millennia you get this layer cake like thing where the all separated in time and you can see how things have changed and that is really what was here in evidence at the new ski site and some of the other there's only showing it in a minute a vast amount of native american pottery came out from this excavation and in fact enable jim to formulate a series of decorative changes through time that we still use today and finally publish with a lot of reference to other sites in one thousand nine hundred one which is the system we all northeastern archaeologist utilize today and came from these early excavations on the new site these whole pots with you know these beautiful what we call drag stamp or taking a tooth tool and going like this at an angle throughout to make these remarkable pot we think as archaeologists that might this might have had a deft decorative significance but was more likely to drive air bubbles out of the pottery so that it wouldn't fire would explode in an open firing but then quickly tooth tool but you would rock it on a z thing like this and then pseudo scallop which is a very interesting horizon beginning around twenty one hundred years ago and continuing to about seven thousand nine hundred years ago where on the coast they would take the edge of a scallop shell which had this wavy line and use that to decorate pots but it was such a compelling design motif that people in the interior here would remake it likely out of wood or even perhaps trade scallop shells into the interior to recreate these shift to bow and arrow technology beginning around two thousand and eighty made out of local courts and again just a native american timeline here showing where the span was they did find some evidence of what we call late archaic or or around three to four thousand year old fire pits deep down but they were very ephemeral and light nothing like the mass amount of occupation that was evidence during this woodland period from three thousand years ago on and particularly from about two thousand years ago on one of the most remarkable things about the one you see site was their variety of floral the food remains they were able to analyze buckwheat and then you variety of other medicinal uses and then and then dies showing not only giving us an insight into what native americans utilize but also the  itself and a public outreach document was was published out of that which is now available online recently scanned it and even though it's somewhat dated thought it should still be it still stands an important document moving on we don't all right move over to the ethan allen homestead area itself shortly there after a number of things began to be  proposed for the interval both to try to assess the hydrological dynamism and other things improvements some related to the connector others just you know with the increased pace of development so here we have here the homestead itself which is an archaeological site designated v t c h one three six in our inventory or the one hundred thirty six site in shit and county for which we have documentation we knew about this before but for some reason this got listed before which is v t c h ninety six and in the lidar you can really see what an interesting landform this is coming out under these lower you know often inundated  inundated low lying fields and just above it we have this neat little peninsula where the native americans would have been somewhat drier but had immediate access to probably their corn fields out here and how do we know that oh i don't want to give short shrift i just grabbed one slide from this but various archaeological excavations that have been done here for a found a variety of somewhat mixed not altogether full of integrity historic artifacts and some native hundred seventy nine you can see a very deep feature here with some fire cracked rock other the remains of fire hearth here interesting suite of stone tools but more interesting is the pottery that came out that has a variety of decorative motifs but the fire hearts are what words protection potentially most interesting about this because in this particular one th likewise they found at this general site area but are not that also date to roughly the same time period indicating to pamela bumstead and pete thomas who published this and which i just revisited last night that they were fully invested in agriculture to the exclusion of other things like many other native american groups were by this time but were still had a robust collecting strategy where they were going out and getting butternuts collecting things and then probably augmenting them with maze so not fully invested in this agricultural lifestyle so we have to investigate this more but it seems likely and then also an ephemeral fire pit that they dated to almost three thousand years ago showing the use of this land form through the woodland interesting i mean just to give you an idea of the lidar and how detailed it is you can see the individual furrows from you know the ploughing and you can see this very dynamic oxbow system here and map of what the excavations were like and these are not typical in vermont this they knew the soils were so deep that they did a bunch of backhoe trenches and then augmented that with augers and i mention this only because i'm kind of proud of myself  because a couple days ago my colleague scott who worked on this in the late one nine hundred seventy said you know i would love to be able to relocate where those pits were but it's so hard because our permanent datum was the fire tower which is gone now and all the stuff and i so i think i can do it next i matched up these old oxbow systems and then and report them with the lidar with this you know really remarkable spatial control i have i was able to match it up and then next slide  next slide then map because i had that map geo referenced and put up where the test pits were so now now is all excited now he's like well maybe we've got to do something now so so stay tuned next slide so remarkable depths to the flood plain deposits here i couldn't find a picture but there's a famous picture of p thomas a young pete thomas way at the bottom of this that would never pass ocean muster now i mean is like so dangerous and he's just sitting on the bottom traveling away but i'll show a few side to this next slide how deeply they go and it's a little bit hazy here he did it come back  it's a little bit hazy here but you can see these you know just lenses of flood deposits just going back in time over thousands of years i still have this but for some reason this isn't working oh anyway so very very deep were really able to hone in on particular areas of native american habitation and sort of do a riddick rhys am pulling this was just a broad survey so it was wherever they happen to find stuff and yet they found quite a bit of stuff continuing on this is a diagram of the all the various flood deposits and you can see that many of them were in an old channel you saw the dynamism here and that's why they're leapt up near the end next slide kind of tough to see but  remains of fire pits here next slide and notably at three metres down you can see three metres or two and a half meters down to roughly seven they came upon a human create cremation dated t around thirty six hundred years ago next slide i won't show the images themselves away here's some some of the few artifacts scrapers one of these lavon or triangle spear points that dates to about a thousand years ago near a fire hearth dating to that time period small numbers of native american pottery that we can date through stylistic motifs through this two thousand year period next slide and then i won't show the human remains themselves but a diagram of the remarkable insight we could say that you know virtually the entire intervale out there even as much even as dynamic as it was and certainly some areas were clearly destroyed by recent movie m you saw that but other areas remain intact particularly for this late woodland period later on vermont gas systems wanted to run some propane line so they did some other  again large trenches run through and we took this opportunity to look at all the flood plains to take our fee varied but showing various lenses of dark material that show stable surfaces and may indicate that native americans were living on th surfaces through time i did find some artifacts in various places to next next slide just showing people working in the late seventies you can see the mcneil plant in the back next slide  various native american fire hurts again next slide and then we move on to the mcneil site itself the mill generating plant was an early site again that was done by the university of vermont consulting archaeology program next  the there are still flood up so it's but they're probably you know be the equivalent of a thousand year floods many of them didn't quite get to cover over that area with such depth it's a little bit higher up if any of you ever ever been out there and it probably just got the most severe flooding so there was some flood separation but not like way out on the intervale next slide and again close up of this area obviously quite disturbed due to  building of the generating plant and a lot of the farm and industry that was going on down in this particular location from the early eight hundred so on next slide but that there was some work done at the mcneil plant and around it in the  in the one nine hundred eighty s next slide next slide just showing what it looked like in the early eighty's i try to you know i tried to find a picture just of the of the landfill when it was open on the internet i couldn't find one i guess there's a collective forgetting but i remember going on the on the belt line when i was a kid and seeing it right out there in the tractors driving all over town this seagulls everywhere and  you know it's remarkable i was just driving here today and it's all treated down i mean it's just it's really remarkable but but oh well and again a series of fire hearths and other things  of which contain butternut none of which were contained maysan these but again to the same time period continuing on and continuing and some of the things again are remarkably similar suite of tools from the other side of the river and from farther out these jacks reef corner notch middle woodland spear points again made out of local materials next slide and then some later triangles from the late woodland made out of court site slide and then wide variety of pottery showing a variety of decorative motifs next slide more recently just subsample metalwork back in the area early digital you can see people out there  slide and then we thought that we knew the limits of the mcneil site but when there was going to be some work done at the intervale there was some archaeology again done by the university of vermont consulting archaeology program they were going to do various things like next slide move the calc in the barn over or move the barn over and do other various improvements and so an archaeological it was investigation was undertaken around that area to see what might be found and largely in the supplemental area over here a lot of native american artifacts were found but they were sort of displaced interspersed with historic things indicating that it was once much like the rest of the  plant area very heavily occupied by native americans but not a lot of integrity left continue on just to an overview of aerials to show the change through time this is preplanned one nine hundred thirty seven aerial a rare early two thousand and four and next slide so as part of these changes you v m did some work on the intervale center side of the road and while they did find some disturbance they actually found next slide the next slide so that in many areas there was modern fill probably to level the area out that's this sort of light stuff here but underneath  still intact soil deposits many of which contain native american artifacts particularly pottery and john crock and the v m anthropology department some school did a field school down here recovered many more remains next sli and again that's very clear here you can see that that sort of fill or flood packet below which there were intact artifacts next slide and then particularly this area right by the river which was a berm made for this pond but underneath the berm the wrist still intact native american deposits and then other work for who passes again just getting these little windows into the deep flood example of an italian style farmhouse with a high degree of historic integrity exterior features such as the decorative window moldings porches with elaborate carvings double entry door and slate roof or characteristic defining features of the italianate style and again credit to brit years and is used for probably the purpose that it was used for millennia now largely which is agriculture although you know as others have noted particularly that masters student katherine blas and many people more recently  weighing the benefits and detriments of of the vast floods that have you know make it a gamble to to farm out there the soil is very fertile but the danger of losing your crop is significant i just want to end with saying that the interval wasn't certainly the only era area that was popular for native americans particularly in this later phase this woodland period farther up can recognize the airport  here in the backroads national guard road they were what they have now expanded the national guard air national guard center prior to doing that several consultants anding up with the university of vermont consulting archaeology program that did the detailed phase three work documented next slide a major what was determine to be native american village dating to for those of you here before i think i mention this site because it is remarkable there were there were some six five six or six radiocarbon dates run in various things to one maze or corn was discovered at the site in a fire pit in the storage pit two on but are not again this interesting  mix of of naturally harvested nut trees and then maze augmenting and one on hop hornbeam you know would species and all of them came out to the exact same radiocarbon dates never had that happen in vermont normally they're all over the place and they got to bend your mind around what was wrong but they all came out to thirteen fifteen eighty after the calibration and extensive we will go through some of these slides here next slide the two major blocks were done on either side of the sort of swell and we hypothesize that the base of the swell actually was a spring that's been infill and so once it would have probably been a village that was a raid around this spring in the middle next slide you can see here again the  radiocarbon dates all showing and the blues are positive test pits are test pits and had native american artifacts there's very few reds and you can see we only excavated over there are going to put the road so the rest is still preserved  and luckily sloc safe away behind the national guard fences but we only saw very little of a massive probably native american village next slide  just showing the this is non depositional now so we're up off the flood plain next slide but that black is all a living surface basically the soil made organically rich by just people living on it for so long and then interspersed in that a series of feature storage pits fairhurst next slide which you can see here next slide and then you know as archaeologists do we took every little piece of to fifty by fifty centimeter squares in a particular pen centimeter depth and put them all into an x l spreadsheet and then ran these contour analysis to see where the densest things are and you can see this clear density and then the blues are the completely empty indicating that they ate all the corn and took it out and what's left is just the you know the really the remnant next slide and just showing some other detail than the other block detailed he maps and then where we found all the late woodland arrowhead live on a spear arrowheads next slide and again a close up view next slide and then where we found all the you know the live on a projectile points here hundreds of them is a remarkable next slide and then what we hypothesize from all that mapping is that we identified probably a portion of one native american elongated house i hesitate to use the formal term longhouse which is much more iroquois and but an elongated house much of which was  on one end was disturbed by national guard road yep and then a series of other late woodland sites around this area as well so not just the intervale but another node further up the when you see a river that shows intensive late woodland occupation through time but what was notable loved about national guard road is it was off the flood plain it was nestled into sort of a normal all of the wood that we found there with the very few exceptions like that hopper and being with jack pine which now there's less than five hundred acres inch and county but was once a major forest type encompassing something like twenty thousand square and it seems like they might have burned it down to form the village and they probably kept up there in the winter nestled from the win but still in close proximity to the when you see the river itself able to access their stores so rounding out the seasonal movement and then finally i'll just go through this very quickly because i know i'm almost out of time continue camp johnson showing another view on a tributary of the a new ski interior you can see it there next slide showing the other extent these logistical hunting for ease by probably a few native american hunters into the woods we strongly suggest think that this was a deer yard a very small just sort of fire pit you know roughly about this thing and surrounding it was we tested ninety many test pits and didn't find a thing and then we got to this one next slide and next slide and we found all of these spear points and the remains of the legs of a deer and and radio carbon dated plant foods and so we get this remarkable picture of what looks like a couple hundred years going out you know capturing a deer eating the legs because those were probably the part that they could you know feast on without you know destroying the whole meal and then probably being in the rest of the carcass back for food in the in the fall or winter so we get this whole seasonal round and when we begin to synthesize all of these archaeological sites not just these concentrations on the air bill but throughout the basement throughout vermont we can begin and we're just starting to do this now get this nuanced picture of native american life through time across space and really begin to fill out the remarkable histories and pasts of these these folks so without all leave it and thanks very much and i'm happy to take any questions yeah just that they're triangular although some people call them triangles you know the term that we use which was left over from the archaeologist of the originally defined type was la vonna which is based upon an old the state in new york state has no reference to anything real but some people just called triangles because they're ubiquitous across the northeast around this time period post a thousand and eighty they just start going up everywhere and they're very easy to manufacture the toughest thing with with lovato's is getting them fit enough so they would have been have to but otherwise they're very easy to manufacture and they were small and could be slotted into arrows versus the larger things that were meant for spears and so it's you see this change in technology they say and they also seem to this is an oversimplification but they stop seeming to care about their form as much they're much more expedient the just quickly chip something out put it on and then post contact begin to see this same triangular form be replicated out of iron brass other things so they're continuing to put them on the arrows but now they're utilizing the new metal resources that are coming yeah this is a great question and someone brought this up in march and like i said then and i will say it now it is a very troubling and it is it is so problematic and it and yet it's so important as a baseline data to try to figure other things out about life ways but every time someone attempts it some other archaeologists will just come outside like that's ridiculous i mean it's it's the most thankless job in archaeolog try to figure out population density and having said that we are getting to the point now at least in chiton addison county where there's enough sites where if we really did a lot of g i s based work about how many people at this particular site might have been able to you know habitate there for a given period of time and then extrapolating that out and we might in some decent you know not too distant future be able to give some estimates like out of thousand eighty the population we estimate in the champlain valley was this much at least on the vermont side we're getting to that point having said that you know it's it's caused yeah there but there are some interesting anthropologists that have done work about what is the minimum human population that can exist without dying out you know that can you know suffer the ups and flows of you know disease and famine and those are very interesting statistics and it's likely for much of vermont's prehistory that they weren't much above that so the average band size might have been fifty to one hundred one hundred fifty people not probably not more than that it wasn't until this late woman people work  period when agriculture begins even though as i stressed it's not totally reliant upon agriculture like some other folks weren't in the ohio valley or in the mississippi valley they were still augmenting it with a lot of natural foods but they probably had smaller population sizes even if they were staying with their farm fields a little bit longer than they used to so this yeah and there is some there's a book that you know really has some if you know as an archaeologist i can nitpick with a lot of the nuances of what this author writes but his name is charles man and he wrote a book called fourteen ninety one the year before columbus came and what north america was like or actually the western hemisphere was like and he does a great job of synthesizing a broad strokes and basically saying that population estimates for north america at the on the year before you know columbus arrived were vastly underestimated there was probably you know fifty one hundred million people living you know here right now and that previous estimates were very very two to too low and any case that we've looked at in particular case studies particularly in the northeast which was contacted so early you know ninety to ninety five percent of people died or were or had to flee or you know otherwise were hi prior to any one bothering to really begin to count and so it's problematic and yet using archaeological sites as a proxy is also problematic because we know we're only getting a sample of the sample you know so these are these are the various things that you know some somebody would yell at you for soon as you put out a paper and the other question yeah ok yeah great great question so it's the remote division first for preservation has a website if you go there think about this my mind and you go to the tab page on the left you will see resources and rules and what the resource is not the rules and then into that you click on digging archaeology and then in that there's a series of publications and many of them you know i will fully admit are dated but once upon a time the division for preservation put forth some money or got a grant to have these things done and i i don't want to see them go by the wayside so i've actually been going through our old catalogs and rescanning them and putting them on and with the cabbie out that we've learned a lot since they came out you can get things like  seasons the pre history you get some other interesting things that were done in the seventy's and eighty's some general readers handbooks and then i believe like bridges publication is on the interval center's website and and if you have any well broadly the techniques were very similar although only in the sense that they made stone tools with probably bone handled things and then other harder stones but if you talk to a  recreates particular spear point or arrow head styles using only the techniques that they would have thousands of years ago they will swear to you that there are a variety of differing techniques that were utilized in and they  because the sort of tragic story of this native american that came out of hiding in the great basin in the late eighteenth hundreds was named ishii and his technique for making spear points was to use like a the weight of your body to chip them out like this on a long stick so yes broadly speaking you know they man they use the same techniques but when you get down into the nuances actually they were quite different in quite different regions and a lot of it depended upon the parent material that you were trying to work if you could have if you had a city and nearby or happen to have it you could almost blow on it and it would you know chip in to but something like court say i mean there's a court site kori up in near little rock pond in mount and it's kilometer long and you probably not know what you're looking at and so you went up there but but but in certain areas you can see them trying to break big cobbles support site and the only thing they can do is carry another giant boulder up like ten feet on the cli face and just drop it down on another because it's the only way they can break it it's so dense and in fact my my colleagues who do this they've all got tennis elbow and they've had to stop the course like because it just hurts too much  dense so it's remarkable even though some of the stuff seems rough you know like those up there it's a remarkable achievement to actually make something out of the stone it was not a very good stone very very dense once you've finished it but  ball hand insight up in alberta there was a schedule of sites down on the lower connecticut in windsor very recently there has been many more there is another site in alberta there is that headquarters and porcupine sites on route seventy eight swanson a massive excavation that found a lot of corn in a very similar circumstance that when you ski in a lluvia floodplain the very very dense home to native americans the homeland of mrs way of kno from for the last ten thousand years probably and again village sized settlement in fact including the first definitive remains of a longhouse of their dating to around this late was in period but  then the first sites on the outer creek that had corn and come out just recently last two years in fact the report isn't even done yet so i can't even finish tell you more details so the more that we're looking the more that we're find and that it wasn't just although limited to probably these major river valleys of variety of locales did evidence call yeah you can show us all these sites on the internet site or how can you protect them from somebody going over there deciding to do their own good and ruining everything well well here's the here's what i'll say about that there is an agricultural exemption so agriculture is is protected and so if people want to do that during the course of agriculture with with some specific exceptions which i'm not going to get into now they can by and large do that when certain things are below ground there's you know we sometimes go out this does have some overly burdensome protections but as a state the archaeological district is you know we're mindful of that but there's a lot of things that you can do now if it's commercial development if you need a permit and actually fifty eight to forty eight permit if you're expanding generation facilities that will have to be reviewed just like anything else but you know it's become increasingly clear that other than compost is a is a case study in that where they have actually had to move because of the flooding and the massive scale operations there in terms of individuals digging if you're if you're going out with a specific purpose to dig an archaeological s it is the it is this private land that is the owner's property with the exception of human remains which there is a protocol for if they're found the owner's property and not specifically in a vote here but just in  vermont if they're not going to be developing and they allow someone to just go and dig up their lawn then that's perfectly acceptable however much you would not necessarily condone that or perhaps try to steer them in a more constructive endeavors it is property rights or sacrosanct and they can they can do or allow others to do what they want on know you might walk in a little late this was one of the first slides i showed it's actually an early it's taken from a native american term but it it was angle sized early on to essentially mean a very fertile valley yes there was yes i don't know except they got taken down much to the dismay of my friend who tied all of his archaeological data into that fire down but technology sa