FINDING THE PILGRIMS

On a sticky day last June, archaeologist David Landon peered into a rectangular, three-foot-deep excavation unit on the edge of an old cemetery. “That layer they’re coming down on, despite being deeply buried, is very dark. It looks like topsoil,” Landon said. Two stocking-footed field school students gently scraped dirt into dustpans. “It’s very organic and rich.”

Landon and Christa Beranek, both of the University of Massachusetts Boston’s Fiske Center For Archaeological Research, co-direct Project 400: The Plymouth Colony Archaeological Survey, an investigation to discover the location of the original 1620 Pilgrim settlement under downtown Plymouth, Massachusetts. Landon believes he’s looking at a trash pit from the seventeenth century that was probably located next to a house.

The Pilgrims built their homes with wood and thatch, and all that’s left of them is a series of stains from decayed posts that have enriched and darkened the surrounding soil with organic matter. “We are mapping very subtle soil stains, variations in soil color and texture and artifacts that are present,” he said. “These are some of our main pieces of evidence.”

This evidence is helping the archaeologists identify the perimeters of the Pilgrim settlement. Surprisingly, this is the first time anyone has come so far in identifying its location. The timing of the discovery is serendipitous, as the colony’s 400th anniversary, for which extensive activities are planned, is approaching.

In early 1600s England, the only sanctioned way to worship God was through the Church of England. So when a group of religious people wanted to practice their faith in a simpler, less-structured way, calling for the creation of new churches separate from the Church of England, they were harassed and jailed. Some of these so-called Separatists fled to the Netherlands, where they stayed for more than a decade, until they decided it was time to establish their own colony in a new land where they could be independent.

The group secured ships and a deal with investors that financed their voyage in return for goods like fish, furs, and timber. After several delays the Mayflower sailed for America on September 6, 1620, with 102 passengers. After first landing on Cape Cod in November and finding the area unsuitable for a village, a party of men eventually discovered an abandoned Native American settlement known as Patuxet (its Wampanoag residents had been decimated by an unknown European disease three years earlier) in what’s now Plymouth. It had a good harbor, cleared fields, and a hill that could provide defensive protection. The Mayflower landed there in December, and the English spent the first harsh winter on the boat while they began building their homes.

Only fifty-two people survived the first year. They started building a fort and palisade walls, and in March 1621, they communicated with the Wampanoag. A man named Squanto, who had been kidnapped by English sailors and eventually returned home, taught the colonists how to grow corn. In the fall of 1621, as the story goes, the English colonists celebrated their first harvest, sharing the bounty with the Wampanoag in what we now call the first Thanksgiving. Over the next several years, more English settlers arrived in Plymouth, and the colony became quite successful.

But physical evidence of that first Pilgrim settlement had never been found until Landon and Beranek’s investigation. “The written accounts are pretty detailed for the Plymouth Colony, but they also have huge holes in them, such as, there’s no actual map of the settlement or its layout… and a lot of this history is very mythologized,” said Landon. Henry Hornblower, who established a replica of the colony

An aerial view of the excavations on Burial Hill. The grey structure with the black and brick doors is an 1830s burial vault that cuts through the site. Excavations in front of and behind the vault revealed a series of building postholes, trash pits, and many seventeenthcentury artifacts from the original settlement. Native American and English pottery was found in the trash pits, suggesting the use of Native pots in the English houses.

called Plimoth Plantation, and archaeologist James Deetz conducted digs from the 1940s - 1970s to learn about the Pilgrims’ daily lives. Their work informed the construction of historically-accurate homes at Plimoth Plantation. Deetz also conducted test digs in downtown Plymouth, but he uncovered little related to the seventeenth century and didn’t fully document his findings. It had rained hard that morning in Plymouth, and the salty smell of the bay hung in the breeze. Landon thought the dig might be delayed, but at the last moment, the weather improved. Still, big drops of leftover rainwater fell from a tree arched over us and onto the map Landon was holding of Burial Hill, a cemetery dating back to the 1680s where the crew was excavating. “One of the amazing

things about digging here is that even though parts of Plymouth look very undeveloped and parklike currently, it’s completely an anthropogenic environment,” he said. “Even a lot of the natural-looking areas are a creation, a human creation.”

History has it that Plymouth Colony was topped with a fort on a hill and surrounded with a palisade wall that swept down towards Plymouth Bay. One of the most widely-accepted conjectures about the colony’s location is Burial Hill. A small white sign that sits near the top of the hill proclaims: “SITE OF THE FIRST FORT, BUILT IN 1621.”

The archaeologists wanted to find those palisade walls and locate the remains of the original colony, and also, according to Landon, “add detail and nuance to our understanding of the profound cultural exchange that came from the regular contact between Native people and the English colonists.”

In 2013, after surveying other sites around the town and finding no intact seventeenth-century features or early artifacts, the researchers started working on a sliver of Burial Hill on the southeastern corner near School Street that had no marked graves. In the 1700s and 1800s, houses, stables, warehouses, and two schools lined one of the streets, and they were torn down in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The archaeologists searched for the foundations of the back walls of those buildings, hoping the section of the hill behind these walls would be undisturbed.

They began surveying the hill with ground-penetrating radar (GPR), which provided a good outline of the buried remains of those walls. They incorporated this data into a geographic information system, and they also added historic and modern maps and aerial photos of this area. In 2014, the researchers began excavating. The crew uncovered an undisturbed Wampanoag stone tool workshop in 2015 with dozens of flakes that resulted from the production of points.

In another area south of the stone tool workshop, the researchers discovered a pit, above which, in disturbed deposits, were primarily European seventeenth-century artifacts, including the heel of a smoking pipe with the initials

Archaeology student Megan Sheehan displays colonial artifacts from excavations in Brewster Garden. “RB” surrounding a dagger and a heart. This is the maker’s mark of English pipe maker Richard Berryman, and it could have belonged to one of the pilgrims. The researchers also found evidence of structures here. “These people were so materially poor that there’s not a lot of their trash scattered everywhere. So if you’re finding seventeenth-century artifacts, you are on top of a site,” said Landon. Though the excavation area containing the pipe heel also had Wampanoag artifacts, the concentration of European artifacts suggested the area was located inside the colony, and the Wampanoag workshop, which contained only Native artifacts, outside. “So we have found the inside and the outside [of the palisade wall]. We haven’t found the actual wall yet.” In 2016, the team opened seven excavation units, three of which were next to the area where the pipe heel was discovered. They found postholes and trenches, a hole with tiny fish bones, and a pit with a partial calf skeleton in it. These

features, and the stratigraphic layer above them, all contained Native and European ceramics dating to the 1600s, which led them to conclude that the calf and fish bones and the associated features were of the same age. The researchers also discovered over 200 European and Native lithic artifacts, and a large trash pit that contained more European and Wampanoag artifacts. One of the postholes they found was reinforced with stones and may have been part of a Pilgrim house. Beranek imagines a British woman sweeping debris out of her home, which is then trampled, forming a trash pit.

This year the researchers uncovered a treasure trove of tin-glazed pottery, pipe stems, and bowl fragments, Native pottery, trade beads, and a buckle (“A great find, as it connects us to an individual person who wore this as part of their clothing,” said Landon), in addition to several more postholes and other features.

In addition to determining the location of the original colony, the archaeologists are trying to evaluate the impact the settlement had on the surrounding landscape, so they’re also excavating an area outside the colony in what is now called Brewster Gardens, a park that surrounds a spring-fed stream called Town Brook that likely served the Pilgrims. “In Brewster Gardens we are in an exploratory phase,” said Beranek. “It’s all exciting, because it’s all very new—what kind of potential does this area have?”

“So [Brewster Gardens], at the turn of the twentieth century, contained an electrical generating plant,” Landon said. “And the whole rest of the area along the Town Brook was very industrialized.” Town Brook runs into Plymouth Bay. Originally, the section near the bay was a tidal estuary, and Native people farmed along its banks. Historical accounts mention wharves and docks in the seventeenth century, and later, the stream’s water power was tapped for industrial uses. In anticipation of the 300th anniversary in 1920, the industrial buildings were demolished, the land filled, and the park created. “They intentionally buried earlier stuff, so that potentially means it’s preserved underneath areas that were filled,” he said. “We’d be really interested to go down and find original shorelines, small wharves, areas where they were dumping to make land early on.” In addition, Town Brook is right behind Leyden Street, which historical accounts say could have once been the main street of Plymouth Colony. Landon thinks part of the palisade wall runs between the Town Brook and Leyden Street.

This summer the researchers discovered a buried post that might be part of an early wharf. And as at Burial Hill, they’ve uncovered lots of Native ceramics and lithics that they’re starting to analyze. Landon and Beranek are struck by the ubiquity of Native artifacts intermingled with English

David Landon (right, with white cap) oversees the mapping of the deep soil levels in Brewster Gardens. The seventeenth-century surfaces were covered with fill in the early twentieth century.

Archaeology students wash artifacts in the Plimoth Plantation lab while visitors observe their work. Artifact processing in an open lab allows visitors to see some of the seventeenth-century artifacts right after they have been excavated.

artifacts. “I think we are starting to get a very different idea of the material interaction between the Native people and the colonists,” said Landon. The many pieces of Native pottery and lithics in seventeenth-century contexts with English artifacts suggest there could have been a greater connection between the two cultures than previously thought. “We think it’s a sign of Native pottery actually being used in English houses,” he said. They are trying to determine how much Native material culture was in the 1620 colony, as the quantity indicates the extent of interaction between the two peoples.

Deetz, the foremost archaeological scholar on the Plymouth colony, found Native artifacts during his excavations, but he assumed they were the vestiges of Patuxet, the Native American settlement on top of which the colony was built. “That’s actually been the accepted wisdom in Plymouth Colony archaeology,” said Landon. “As soon as you do that, you write off the possibility of seeing the presence of Native people at all.” The artifacts Deetz recovered are curated at Plimoth Plantation, and Landon and Beranek’s team has been reanalyzing them.

Previous Plymouth archaeology has traditionally focused on the transplant of English culture onto the New World. Landon and Beranek are focused on the convergence of the English and Wampanoag cultures. “Were there other tools and technologies that shaped the Native and English interactions beyond our stereotyped version of the story? What does it mean if Native pots are adopted into English cooking?” Landon wondered. “We are told the story of corn, but what other Native plants made their way into daily use in the English houses, and what does this sayabout Native and English cultural knowledge and understanding of the landscape? These are the types of questions we are trying to investigate.”

According to the Fiske Center’s web site, the archaeological investigations are “designed to help create a scholarly legacy for the 400th anniversary, teach students and teachers the archaeology and history of Plymouth and its place in the seventeenth-century Atlantic World, and engage the public in a meaningful consideration of the period and its impact on both Colonial and Native communities.

By the end of five weeks of long days of hard work, during which the weather changed from cold and wet to hot and muggy, the crew had recovered enough data for a year’s worth of analysis. Backfilling the excavation units at the end of the dig “is kind of heart-breaking,” said Landon. But believing that they’re slowly correcting the archaeological record makes the wait until next year’s field school a little easier.

RACHAEL MOELLER GORMAN is an award-winning science writer based outside Boston, Massachusetts.