A Fishing Scene Fishing is a year-round part of Pequot life, and these cousins in the dugout canoe appear to have had good luck today. The man in front is showing off a tautog, a salt-water fish common in this region; the basket in the center of the canoe is brimming with them. They'll bring their haul to the man's wife here on shore, as it's usually the women who prepare and cook the catch.  The woman has already gotten out her sharp stone knife to clean two large tautog that were caught earlier today. After she's gutted, boned, and split the fish, she'll add them to the drying rack behind her. We dry and smoke lots of foods to preserve them, and we might not eat this fish until there's snow on the ground. All around the woman cleaning the fish is evidence of other fishing and shellfishing activities. The woodsplint basket on the ground holds fresh mussels and quahogs, or hard-shelled clams. These can be cooked in the shell and eaten right away, or they can be pried open and dried. We catch some kinds of deepwater fish, like cod, with hook and line, and we use cone-shaped basket traps for catching eels. In the canoe on the bank you’ll see tools we use to catch large fish – a harpoon and a three-pronged spear called a leister. We have some means of catching just about every kind of edible fish in this region, because, as a coastal people, we rely on seafood throughout the year. Behind the Scenes with Curator Steve Cook The necklace that the woman here is wearing is made from fish vertebrae, the bones from the spinal columns of large fish like striped bass, bluefish, and cod. We know that fish vertebrae were made into beads of some kind, because they've been found archaeologically in two or three shell middens in this region; one on Martha's Vineyard, the island off the coast of Cape Cod, and another on Block Island, off the Rhode Island coast. It's really easy to make these bones into beads; you can almost push through the centers with a pointed stick, especially when the bones are moist after boiling or cooking. So the woman's necklace is composed of a number of these vertebrae strung together in graduated sizes. Whether or not the beads that were found archaeologically were actually strung together as a necklace is open to speculation. But we do know that Native people wore necklaces, and we have some 17th century written references to people wearing bones as pendants and necklaces. So it seems like a reasonable assumption, and we think this necklace goes well with the whole fishing motif here.