When the Civilian Conservation Corps cleared a swampy marshland at the mouth of the Lamoille River in the 1930s, they brought in tons of dirt, raising the land by 3 feet or more.
The work was done to create Sand Bar State Park in Milton, but it also unintentionally preserved artifacts from Native people who lived at the site hundreds of years earlier, prior to European contact.
“They capped off the old landscape,” said Niels Rinehart, an archeologist who manages historic properties on state lands. “They essentially sealed it off.”
Beneath that layer of dirt, archeologists found remnants of stone tools from hundreds of miles away — jasper from Pennsylvania, quartzite from northern Quebec, along with pottery in the style of the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, likely made between 1450 and 1500.
“They show the wide breadth of connections that people who lived there, on the east coast of Lake Champlain, had,” Rinehart said.
The objects were discovered in 2022, when the park redid its parking lot and had to dig into the earth to update its stormwater system.
The work isn’t complete — the state is planning another dig to further explore the site as soon as lake levels are low enough. That’s been an issue for the past two years. Right now, the site is underwater.
“We’re just waiting for the lake level to cooperate to be able to do the full work,” said Emily White, who manages a dozen state parks in northwestern Vermont.
The site is special because of the level of preservation and its location said John Crock, who leads the Consulting Archaeology Program at the University of Vermont and was part of the excavation team who worked on the project.
“To find large segments of a ceramic pot was just extraordinary,” he said.
It’s also at a place that would have been well-suited for trade — where people might have crossed Lake Champlain and at the mouth of Lamoille River. The area was likely a series of islands or a stable part of the river bank.
“The artifacts were probably left right there, right in the location we found them,” Crock said.
He hopes to return next fall, when the lake level is at its lowest, to see what else might be uncovered.
“These sites are nonrenewable,” he said. “The more we can learn from a site like this, the more we can fill in gaps in our understanding of how these 12,500 years of Native history in Vermont unfolded.”
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