Repairing the Palisade These men are repairing the palisade, the large fence of wooden posts that now surrounds our village. We've started building these fences as a result of problems we've been having with outsiders, problems that started just a little while ago when Europeans began to frequent our territory.  These newcomers in Pequot territory have come in the hope of profiting from trade with our people. They seek furs, primarily, which are much in demand in their countries.  In exchange they offer ornamental and useful goods that are popular with our people. The problem is that the Europeans also bring things we don't want: epidemic diseases that our people have never before encountered, and serious conflicts. This palisade wall is the result of these conflicts, which have flared up between our people and the newcomers and also among us and our neighbors, the Narragansetts, Mohegans, Niantics, and others. Our people are eager to trade with these men, to get the new cloth, metal, and other goods that they bring with them. And they want furs and other things that we have, too. But it seems that the more we trade, the more problems arise. Sometimes there are misunderstandings over how to do business, or disagreements about how much things are worth. And at other times there are problems between our people and neighboring tribes, because everyone wants to have these new goods, and jealousies arise when there aren't enough to go around. Now we've had to build fences around some of our villages, so that someone who has a grievance can't sneak up on us and catch us off guard. And we place some of our villages on hilltops, where we can keep watch for outsiders. If we have to, we can hide behind this palisade and shoot through the chinks between the posts at anyone who comes to start trouble. Behind the Scenes with Director of Research Dr. Kevin McBride We have a pretty good idea archaeologically how the Pequots built their palisades. We don't find any posts; they disintegrated a long time ago; but we find the remains of the trenches that the posts were in. These are two or three feet deep, eighteen inches wide, and people would place the posts into the trench and then pile earth above them, creating a berm. You can see that berm around most of the palisade here. We also have some European written sources for palisades, particularly one describing the Pequot fort in Mystic in 1637. That source talks about the timbers being 10 or 12 feet above the ground, rammed three feet into the ground, with earth "being cast up;" that's the berm I mentioned earlier. The writer goes on to say that "they pitch, close together as they can, young trees and half trees, as thick as a man's thigh or the calf of his leg." That's a nice description, but we're not sure how to interpret part of it. Are half trees half width, or half height? Based on the remains of a 17th century fort that we found at Mashantucket, the Pequots are building these palisades with the trees as close together as they can to stop a bullet. That leads us to believe that they're filling the gaps between the big trees with saplings; half-width trees; so that's how we've built the palisade here. This is a good example of how we often use archaeology and written sources together to reconstruct the past.