The first humans to make their appearance on the North American continent crossed over from Asia about 26,000 years ago in a lull between glacial advances. Only with the final retreat of the glacial front about 10,000 years ago did they enter the New England region. These first inhabitants were migratory hunters, who followed the herds grazing on the rich tundra just beyond the glacial front.
About 8,000 years ago solitary woodland hunters, today called “Archaic” Indians, arrived. They stalked their prey in forest and at sea with flint-tipped spears, and foraged for ground nuts, roots, and berries.
The Archaics left few artifacts. One curious remnant are their many “banner stones” rocks shaped to resemble birds, seals, whales, and other animals; it remains uncertain whether their purpose was utilitarian or decorative.
When the season did not favor hunting and foraging inland, the Archaics camped along the shoreline, setting out, in boats constructed of hollowed-out logs, to hunt for seals and the smaller whales. They also caught fish in weirsmazes of poles driven upright and interlaced with brush, into which fish swam at high tide and found themselves enmeshed when the tide fell. Unfortunately the rising sea level has drowned many of the Archaics’ shore encampments. Others lie buried under many feet of salt marsh.
Not all the sites have disappeared, however. In 1913, Boston subway excava- tors, building a new line down Boylston Street in the Back Bay (a great mud flat that had been filled in and transformed into a fashionable neighborhood in the late nineteenth century) began to uncover decayed wooden stakes, some four to six feet high, which had apparently been driven into a layer of clay once the surface of the flats, but now buried 16 feet below sea level.
Further excavations during the 1930s determined that the weir had extended over a two-acre area and contained an estimated 65,000 poles. Such a project must have required a large population to keep the poles and brush in repair. Tests show the weir is some 4,500 years old. Evidence of repeated attempts to keep it from being silted over by the muck suspended in the rising level of the tidewater reveal that it must have served for a long time.
Around the time of Christ, a more sophisticated culture entered the New England region from the Midwest. The Algonquians introduced pottery making, the birchbark canoe, the bow and arrow, and crop cultivation. They soon dominated the Atlantic seaboard from the Maritime Provinces to the Carolinas. It was their descendants, by then separated into numerous tribes, that the European explorers described as “of good invention, quick understanding, and ready capacity tall stature, broad and grim visage.” of Much of what we know about the Algonquians, aside from archaeological evidence, has been sifted from the accounts of early European explorers and settlers.
This, unfortunately, has made the Indians’ history a tale told by their enemies. We see them only in terms of the biases, expectations, and personal involvements of those who came to displace them. Understandably, the image given is hardly a coherent one, with Indian weaknesses and strengths variously reviled or extolled.
Even estimates of Indian population vary greatly from one colonial chronicler to another. If the colonists were touting their prowess at exterminating the native Americans, the numbers ran high; if they were seeking to entice others to cross the Atlantic for the new lands, the numbers ran low. Today, scholars feel most comfortable with a projection of from 50,000 to 75,000 Indians in New England just before the Europeans’ arrival.
Most of this population was centered in the fertile lower half of New England. A modern authority locates, circa 1600, 62 inland and 10 shore villages in the Maine-New Hampshire-Vermont region, and 146 inland and 100 shore villages in the lower three states.
A village typically lay beside a lake, river, or protected harbor. Along the coast, Indians chose places of good fishing. When the fish ran, many small groups would congregate together in one great encampment, storing up their catch for the leaner months. Often the shore natives had reciprocal agreements with those living in interior hunting grounds. Such annual visitation rights existed, for instance, between the Indians living above present day Hartford, on the rich lowlands of the Connecticut River, and the coastal settlements some fifty miles to the south, where abundant clam flats lay just offshore in Long Island Sound.
In season these fishing villages of “great resort” typically had a population of a few hundred. The remainder of the year, the Indians divided into small family clusters, living in huts near fields or hunting tracts allotted to them by the tribal leader. The Algonquians lived a semimigratory life, shifting their simple dwellings as season, food supply, death, disease, or enemy dictated.
Their homes, or wigwams, consisted of saplings set into the ground, usually in a circle, then bent over and lashed together to form a dome upon which were laid woven mats, bark, tree boughs, reeds, or other vegetation. Sleeping benches lined the walls within, a few embroidered mats gave decoration, and a smoky fire drove off the insects. Besides this domed style, which was found throughout the region, the long “Quonset hut” shape appeared in southern New England, and the tribes of far eastern Maine tended towards the conical tepee associated later with the nineteenth century Plains Indians.
The residences of the sachems and sagamores were often stockaded and fortified. Some were relatively small, serving as ceremonial dwellings for the sagamore and his court, while others could shelter hundreds from the onslaught of hostile neighbors. When Miles Standish led a scouting party into the Boston region in 1621 he encountered such forts, then abandoned because of a recent sweeping invasion by Indians from the north.
Interminable squabbles igniting into intertribal warfare were a fact of life among the Indians. While some attacks, like the invasion referred to by Standish’s party, were outright wars of conquest, for the most part, petty hostilities were the order of the day: families attacking each other for wrongs, real or imagined, against themselves or their allotted territory. Physical hardship, also a part of the Indians’ existence, required a stoic outlook.
The farther one went north, leaving behind the more fertile lands of southern New England, the harsher life became.
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