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A remnant chimney fire-box at site 102-69
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For two years Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center 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 much as 9,000 years ago to the early twentieth century. A lucky “warm spell” (a few degrees above freezing) provided the opportunity to continue digging through early January of 2003. 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 50cm 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.
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