Winding Down Excavations at Lake of Isles Brian D. Jones, Ph.D. MPMRC Field Archaeology Supervisor [This article also was published in the Connecticut Preservation News.] For two years staff archaeologists, interns and field school participants have been excavating diligently at the Lake of Isles. Over 800 acres of the old Boy Scout camp are now in the process of being remodeled into two world-class, eighteen-hole golf courses.  This construction project has provided an opportunity to carefully examine twenty-one archaeological sites that range in age from as long ago as 9,000 years to the early twentieth century. Now that the sites have been excavated, the challenging process of artifact inventory and analysis has begun in earnest. A total of over 900 square meters of soil was hand-excavated to a depth of one to two feet at the twenty-one sites. The amount of data recovered from the excavations is staggering. Over 58,600 historic artifacts (fragments of glass, ceramics, metal, brick, etc.) and over 20,500 prehistoric artifacts (primarily stone chipping debris, over seventy spear points, and a small amount of pottery) have been inventoried to date, in addition to some 5,000 animal and 1,700 plant remains. These numbers will rise significantly as the inventory process is completed. When this arduous task is finished, it will be possible to map the distribution of all of these artifacts to within 50 centimeters of their original find spots. At that time, the spatial relationships between artifacts should become evident and will allow the interpretation of otherwise unrecorded human activities that occurred long ago. Initial analyses of the Lake of Isles sites have already resulted in three studies. Architectural historian Myron Stachiw incorporated Lake of Isles finds into a study analyzing non-Native architecture from the seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries at the Third Mashantucket Pequot History Conference held at the MPMRC last September. Jennifer Trunzo, a Ph.D. candidate at Brown University, and Jason Mancini, Senior Researcher, MPMRC, discussed eighteenth through nineteenth century racial diversity at the Lake of Isles sites at the meetings of the Society for Historical Archaeology held this January in Providence. Ms. Trunzo is planning to focus her dissertation research on the historic community of the Lake of Isles area. Finally, undergraduate Elizabeth Lees of Central Connecticut State University recently completed a senior thesis examining differences between Middle Archaic (ca. 8,000-6,000 year old) and Late Archaic (ca. 6,000-4,000 year old) sites at Lake of Isles. She focused on issues of site duration and function which might clarify changes in settlement organization that occurred at this time. These exciting sites will continue to provide valuable information regarding the prehistoric and historic life-ways of southeastern Connecticut long after golfers become more common than archaeologists at Lake of Isles. Some sites are bound to remain mysterious for quite some time. One excavated in December remains particularly intriguing. Only after removing hundreds of pounds of fallen rock from the base of a small cliff did a clear historic chimney base appear. It became evident that the mid-eighteenth century occupants of this site had actually built a small house up against the cliff-face. To our knowledge, nothing like this has been recorded in the region, and if it were not for the diligence and hard work of the excavation team, in particular staff archaeologist Julie Brodeur, this interesting site would surely have been overlooked.  This is just one of many examples of curious and otherwise interesting sites examined over the last two years at Lake of Isles. It will likely take years of additional research to tie such enigmatic historic sites to specific names and dates. Similarly, the in-depth analysis of the many prehistoric sites is likely to keep the staff and numerous students occupied for the foreseeable future.