How Do We Know...? It is difficult for experts to speak with certainty about the lives of paleo-Indians 10,000 years ago in what is now southern New England. “The hard evidence that we have to draw on to speak to Paleo-Indian lives 10,000 years ago consists entirely of what we can get out of the ground,” says Dr. Shepard Krech, an anthropologist at Brown University, “and what we get from the ground is not much.” “Sites of this time period, first of all, are quite rare,” explains Dr. Brian Jones, director of field archaeology for the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. “The sites that are known to the archaeological record tend to be small, and certainly in southern New England they’re quite small. They were probably occupied by a small extended family group for a short period of time—a few weeks, or perhaps a month or so.” To paint a picture as detailed as the one in the Museum’s Caribou Kill Diorama, a certain amount of educated conjecture is an absolute necessity, and direct archaeological evidence can only serve as a starting point. “Archaeologists go out in the field, dig up artifacts, and try to read a story into they way they were left in the ground,” says Dr. Jones. “Anthropologists and ethnographers help flesh out the story left in the ground by observing what living people are actually doing—how they organize a camp, how they skin the game, how they share their food, how they hunt their animals, what the relationships between people of different ages and different genders are. Things that are very difficult to see in the archaeological record can really be filled in from what we know about living peoples.”