When Robert Goodby, a professor of anthropology at Franklin Pierce University, sits down to lunch behind the Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough, he knows he’s likely sitting in the same spot as ancient Abenaki, the tribe that lived in the areas now called New Hampshire and Vermont.
He also knows that years of development have probably destroyed whatever evidence of their presence might have survived. But other sites, less disturbed, have shown that the Abenaki and their ancestors have a 10,000-plus-year history on the land, despite the historical suggestion that New England was sparsely inhabited woodland.
Goodby was the second speaker in the Monadnock Summer Lyceum’s speaking series Sunday, presenting “A Deep and Enduring Presence: Using Archaeology to Write Native American History.” His book, “A Deep Presence: 13,000 Years of Native American History,” was released in 2021.
Goodby has been involved in the excavation of several sites throughout New Hampshire, including one as old as 12,600 years, when mammoths and mastodons were still roaming, which show that natives in New Hampshire, while they may not have lived at a single site year-round, did have long connections to certain places.
“That’s a long history in a region where most towns are thinking about celebrating their 200th or 250th anniversary,” Goodby said.
And they are more easily found than some would have people believe.
Most recently, Goodby set out to test four sites in Jaffrey and elsewhere in New Hampshire with his students. He said they were able to find evidence of Native American habitation at all four sites.
Archeological evidence also shows the breadth of that habitation, Goodby said. Artifacts found in the local area, for example, used high-quality stone that can be traced back to northern New Hampshire or Maine, and that stone used in artifacts came from as far away as New Jersey.
Some similarities, such as the V-shaped construction of a fish dam on the Ashuelot River which dates back 4,000 years, are also found in other rivers up and down the coast and to the west. It’s likely, Goodby said, that members of the tribes traveled and traded with each other.
“They were never isolated. The world of these people was large, and it was very complicated,” Goodby said.
Some sites show evidence that the tribes returned to them year after year, or generation after generation.
Early settlers may have thought the land was not inhabited, because the Abenaki were not “anchored” in one location, but their connection to certain areas ran deep, Goodby said.
When white settlers moved in, the archeological history of the Abenaki people begins to fade, Goodby said, as many traded for European tools and clothing, and a huge majority were wiped out by a European epidemic sometime in the mid-1610s. Many Abenaki began to assimilate, or were wiped out deliberately. A bounty was put out for Abenaki scalps – at its height in 1765, a price of 250 pounds was offered per scalp.
“The extermination of Native peoples was part of deliberate policies,” Goodby said.
One known site in Hinsdale, which dates back to 1663, is notable for having European artifacts, but also for its location – not set close to the riverbanks, as most sites are, but farther back, on the top of a high mound. It’s the only site Goodby has ever found with that configuration, and he said it’s notable that it dates to a time post-colonization.
“It’s the only site where people felt they had to be in a defensible location,” he said.
Because of MacDowell Medal Day, there will be no Monadnock Summer Lyceum talk July 10. The next speaker will Tom Wessels, presenting “Coevolution: The Model for Humanity’s Sustainable Future” on July 17 at 11 a.m. at Peterborough Unitarian Church. The lyceum talks are available online at monadnocklyceum.org.
Ashley Saari can be reached at 603-924-7172, Ext. 244, or asaari@ledgertranscript.com. She’s on Twitter @AshleySaariMLT.