A Lithic Journey

A large Normanskill-type stone spear or
knife point from the Late Archaic period
in the collection of the Canton Historical Society. 

As Joe Bagley speaks, his passion for archeology flows. Standing in front of an overflowing room, Bagley looks the part of an archeologist, rugged boots, tough pants, and a boyish smile. The audience hangs on his every word. This is the Friends of the Blue Hills’ 35^th Anniversary Meeting, and the City of Boston Archeologist reveals the amazing history that is beneath our feet. In a word, his talk is about stewardship.

The Blue Hills Reservation is such an amazing place. As someone who has hiked hundreds of miles within its borders, I can never fail to marvel at this historical place in our own backyards. And, this is the perfect time of year to get out and walk on the same trails that man walked on more than 8000 years ago.

The Blue Hills were so named by early European explorers who, while sailing along the coastline, noticed the bluish hue on the slopes when viewed from a distance. The blue comes from the rocks that formed the geology of the hills 600 million years ago. It may be hard to believe but this site was formed as a result of a large volcano that has been worn down over these millions of years to be the site we know today.  And the blue hue of the rock tells a story that extends back almost ten thousand years ago when Native Americans created a bustling community on this land.

City of Boston, Archeologist,
Joseph Bagley conducting field research. 

In his minds eye Bagley, like many of the archeologists who have come before him, can see the camps, the workshops, the quarry sites and the hunting grounds of a great people who were the first stewards of the land along the Neponset Valley. “Many of the trails we walk today are the exact same trails that have been used for thousands of years,” explains Bagley.

Today the trails are used for recreation, but thousands of years ago these were the paths used to commute between quarries to workshops and then onto hunting grounds. The rocks that crunch underfoot tell the story of not only geology of the Blue Hills but also the archeology. It is in the rocks that we start to see why this was the center of industry for early man.

Bagley tells of one “aha” moment. “There was a site that I had read about just south of Granite Links Golf Course, and while still a student with some time on my hands I took an afternoon treat and hiked to look for this area. Based on what I had read, I was not prepared for the scale, I mean you are looking for something and then you discover it is so large you are actually standing in it.”  Bagley says that the personal discovery “was mind blowing.” What he stumbled upon on the western side of the Blue Hill Reservation was the debris of a major prehistoric quarry.

Bagley was off the trail and climbing up the hill, expecting to see rocky outcrops – but instead there were terraces and the back was stone. “I was looking for the rock outcrop, and then I realized there were flakes everywhere. The rock was being dug from the un-weathered rock, which would make for stronger tools. The natives were taking the cobble out of the ground to create the rough shapes leaving behind mounds in the millions of waste products.” At the top of the hill is an old weathered cellar hole of a farmhouse, and the foundation was made up of the byproducts of stone tool making. Essentially the colonial farmer was unknowingly recycling - using waste from thousands of years ago.

What Bagley and other archeologists know is that the Blue Hills Reservation is a treasure worth studying and protecting to understand the tools used by earliest man. While the geology of the Blue Hills was studied as early as 1900, it took almost four decades later for archeologists to delve into the area. In the late 1930’s Harvard’s Peabody Museum began to turn it's attention toward the Blue Hills. Radiocarbon dating was just getting into the science and the archeology team knew that many of the lithic – or stone tool – artifacts were made from stone only found in the Blue Hill range. The Lithic stage was the earliest period of human occupation in the Americas, occurring during the Late Pleistocene period, to a time before 8,000 B.C. The process of flint knapping yields lots of debris. The term knapped is synonymous with "chipped" or "struck.” Throughout the Blue Hills you can find evidence of flaking, pecking, pounding, grinding, drilling, and incising rock in such a way that this area becomes a significant historical resource. 

Allan Lowry 

Canton is a hotbed of early archeological artifacts, and in the collection of the local historical society there are artifacts that include such things such as mortars also known as metates, pestles, grinding slabs, hammerstones, spear points and scrapers. For many people who claim to hunt for arrowheads, they are more likely to find spear points and knives as the bow and arrow was only developed about 1000 years ago. The tools that have been found are much older.  

And we have had local archeologists who have revealed our unique past. Allan Lowry, a much beloved Canton resident found much of what has been discovered beneath some of the most important sites in our town. Allan passed away a number of years ago, but Allan’s wife Elaine recalls how he started. “As a young couple we were raking leaves in the yard and I found a stone that looked like a hammer,” explains Lowry, “ I guess from that point on he was hooked. Each Sunday I would drop him off at a dig site and then I would go to church, he wasn't a church goer.” For Allan Lowry his religion was found deep in the ground and extended back over thousands of years.

This unchanged view across Ponkapoag Pond
is quite close to a Native site used for
perhaps 5000 years an autumn hunting camp. 

Lowry was responsible, in part, for excavating the Green Hill Site, now a protected location and part of the National Register of Historic Places. Highway construction once threatened this place, but today it is now part of the Blue Hills Reservation. The middle and late archaic site is located on the Milton Canton line and encompasses part of the Metropolitan District Commission’s purchase of 78.44 acres of Augustus Hemenway’s estate in 1940.

In 1883 Augustus Hemenway purchased several acres of the site from a family of horse fanciers whose stables then graced the neighborhood. By about 1900 Hemenway had purchased the remainder of the site and upon it situated this "South Farm.” A site report from 1980 writes, “The gentle slopes around the site’s kame hill, which had been used for occasional tillage prior to 1883, reverted back to grazing land. The Hemenway cow pasture was situated just east of the hill. On the site, partridge and quail were hunted.  On the hill itself, virtually treeless until about 40 years ago, strawberries could be picked in season amid scraggly undergrowth, which discouraged all but the most intrepid. Quite possibly the hill has been little disturbed by human activity since prehistoric times. In any case the present mixed pine hardwood cover resembles the hill’s prehistoric appearance.”  In the spring of 1966 more than 200 stone tools were found prior to local highway construction. The site was excavated in two periods, 1966-1972 and then again in 1972-1976.  The conclusion made through the amateur archeology was that this was a site likely used as an autumn campsite, offering easy access to the felsite quarries of the Blue Hills, and provided a manufacturing site for tools.

Bagley knows the importance of the Blue Hills Reservation and his voice wavers with emotion as describes the place as “a mecca of stone production.” Wampatuck Hill, just north of the reservoir, in particular is 353 feet of Rhyolite and largely a source for the raw materials of tool making. Yet another site near Ponkapoag Pond near the golf course yielded evidence of almost 5000 years of use by people of the early and middle late archaic periods. Taken in it’s totality, the Blue Hills Reservation in one fashion or another represents a human timespan starting at the Paleo-Indian Period, through the Archaic, Early and Middle Woodland Periods, and of course the Contact and Colonial Periods. We are talking 16,000 years of man’s use of the natural resources along the Neponset River.

Can we still learn from the Blue Hills? The answer according to Bagley is a definitive “yes.”  During the Middle Woodland Period (1000 - 3000 years ago) – trade routes exploded and goods moved from and between places as far away as Pennsylvania and Coxsackie, New York. We know this, because we have found tools made of stone that only came from these places. And then at 1000 years ago all trade stopped. The tools that are found from this period only come from Lynn or Saugus or the Blue Hills. For Bagley, there will always be questions, and fortunately we have the Blue Hill Reservation protecting the answers. As Bagley puts it, “this place is right, this place is good, our human instincts relate to these sites.” For more than 35 years the Friends of the Blue Hills have protected the paths and trails that have been travelled by ancient man. Next time you hike, take a look down and travel back to an ancient time and place.

Burr Lane: A Dog With A Bone - Part II

The Tippet Pipe Found in 1969.
(Copyright 2014 President & Fellows of Harvard College
969-37-50122 and 975-34-10/52976)

The dog was covered in spring mud, after the rains he was always coming home filthy with sticks and old roots. This day was different, as he bounded into the house he had a large ball of some sort, as his owner bent over to retrieve the mess from the dog’s mouth he was shocked to discover that it was a human skull. 

This was 1968, and when Police Chief Daniel Keleher arrived, he knew it would be impossible to locate the rest of the body given the provenance of the dog’s mouth. Placing the skull on the seat of his cruiser, Keleher took it to the old Police Station on Revere Street and put in on the top shelve of the closet in his office. There it sat next to another skull that had been discovered behind the Canton Corner Cemetery. It seems that Keleher had more than a few skeletons in his closet. A year later, Keleher put two and two together and realized the archeologists at the Peabody Museum who had arrived at Burr Lane might want to see the skull that the dog had unearthed a year earlier.

It took a few days to get the necessary permissions from Mrs. Eli Withington, but after some brief negotiations the Peabody archeologist, Dena Dincauze, began her work. What the neighborhood children had uncovered was the Burr Lane Burying Ground. Children had begun the work, but the scientists needed to figure out the boundaries and secure the remains from exposure and deterioration.

Skulls, mandibles, rib cages, hands and feet… all were eroding out of the side of the sandpit. All of the graves were oriented in an east-west fashion with the head laying to the east. The hands were in the pelvic cavity with the right hand above the left except the right thumb below the left hand. On the left ankle was a copper or brass straight pin, which preserved a small portion of a shroud of course linen. In the soil, careful excavation revealed coffin nails in the dirt closely fitting the body. Portions of thick pine planking preserved sections of the coffins.

A woman’s grave was excavated and one of the neighborhood boys found a dotted slipware cup that dated to the 18^th century. More graves were excavated through the course of the weeks ahead. The site became a classroom for the Harvard students who ultimately excavated the complete remains of two individuals and parts of six others. At the same time, the kids were also digging, and the scene must have been surreal.

Key to dating the site was the small pipe that Stephen Turley had found along with the slipware cup. Likely the graves of Jonathan George and Simon George were the earliest, placing the site’s date of first use at 1738. The Harvard archeological team uncovered a rough footstone in place above one grave, but all other stones seemed to have been lost over time.

A Sketch of the Archeological Work in 1998

With Burr Lane to the north, this area is defined by typical fieldstone walls and a meandering cartpath - part of an ancient Indian trail known as the Quantum Path, the Southerly portion connecting to Burr Lane. Historically there was once an orchard, Indian dwellings, and possibly a small meetinghouse.

The land lay untouched until 1998, when Peter Stockus, the landowner submitted plans to the Canton Planning Board for a small residential subdivision on the site. This author reminded Stockus that his new subdivision was the site of the Burr Lane Burying Ground and as such a new archeological investigation might be in order. Always a gentleman and a good citizen of Canton, Stockus hired Joyce Clements to perform an archeological assessment.

Stockus sat atop a Caterpillar excavator and slowly stripped the soil from the area as Clemenst carefully watched. On the last day of the work, at 4:00 pm on Friday, March 20^th a femur was exposed on the western part of the property. The archeologist got to her knees and carefully began brushing away the sand. A second bone appeared and smaller bones were exposed. The following Monday the real work began. This time, history would be preserved in place. By March 30^th all was secure and 18^th century was tucked back into the ground.

The Peabody Museum is an imposing brick building just outside Harvard Yard. To see the artifacts related to Burr Lane requires permission from the Massachuset-Ponkapoag Tribal Council. Once inside, the security is fairly strict and you are ushered into a basement viewing room. A staff person rolls a cart on which sits a large wooden tray. Latex gloved hands, and one by one the grave goods are handled. A small plastic bag contains a tiny fragment of a burial shroud cloth. Roughly woven this was once wrapped around the body in a coffin and fastened with a small copper pin. There are not many items that were taken from Burr Lane – a small handled cup, a fragment of pottery, a lead shot, and twenty coffin nails.

The most amazing item, however, is the small pipe broken into two pieces. The pipe is stained inside from the tobacco that once flowed through the stem. There is a small set of maker’s initials and a cartouche on the side of the bowl. This pipe was made by R. Tippet. The Tippet family was probably the most important pipemakers in the late 17^th through early 18^th centuries. Three generations all hailed from Bristol, England and this pipe was made sometime between the years 1660 - 1722.

Jeanne MacLeod was ten years old, and vividly recalls the small pipe in her hands. “The one thing I remember – the pipe, we were playing with it for days. One kid dropped it and it broke the stem and we all were quite upset since we knew it was an ancient artifact.” Today, Jeanne lives in Hilton Head, SC. “Talking about this today, more than forty-five years ago, the memory of the day comes flooding back.”

All in all, the Peabody has 18 items that were recovered from Burr Lane. There are two full human skeletons and perhaps parts of six to ten others plus six artifacts. The remains are stored respectfully in another location, yet one day they may find their way back to their original resting place.

So while there are human remains of our ancestors safely tucked away on shelves in Cambridge, here in Canton the Burr Lane Burying Ground is largely intact, thanks to Peter Stockus and the advocacy of the local and state historical commissions as well as the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The work done in 1998 yields evidence of fourteen additional “features” or grave shafts. Preliminary reports at the time estimated a total of thirteen individuals interred in graves. In some cases the graves had been disturbed, and in others they were wholly intact. Also, a skull had been found on the topsoil as well as fragments of coffins and nails. Some of the heads were situated with their head to the west and others to the east.

Clements worked carefully to recover the boundaries of the cemetery. One of the conclusions made was that the graves exposed during the work in 1998 suggested two family groups within the burials. This makes sense historically since Huntoon’s History of Canton tells us that four members of Simon George’s family are buried here and four members of Jacob Wilbor’s family are here. Who else is buried here, we may never know. Huntoon tells us that there are Indians, blacks, and children. Forensic evidence suggests that in addition to Native Americans, there are also African American traits found in the early skeletal remains. Jacob Wilbor may be Native or black American: his wife Mary Wills Wilbor was the daughter of Nuff Wills ‘a negro’. Also, we do not know definitively where Seymour Burr is buried. There are several children buried at Burr Lane and the archeology confirms this as well. MacLeod also remembers the skeleton of a dog, and that may tie into the reference of Simon George’s dog following him into the afterlife.

Today, the Burying Ground is part of the Withington Circle Subdivision and is protected under a permanent preservation restriction through the Massachusetts Historical Commission. The graves that have been preserved on-site are contained within a 2,792 square foot easement on Lot 5. Access to the cemetery is preserved through a ten-foot wide path that runs along the property line. There is no sign, and the property is private so there is no trespassing allowed. We do know that no dogs or children will ever disturb this site again. And, there is room reserved for the reburial of the remains in the custody of the Peabody Museum if ever they are released for internment.  Peter Stockus was awarded the Massachusetts Preservation Award in 1999.

Special thanks to the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, Jeremy Comeau, Canton Planning Board, and Gill Solomon, President of the Massachuset-Ponkapoag Tribal Council.