Locating New England’s Woodland villages: Landscape-Scale Geophysics in the Upper Connecticut River Valley

Join us for this virtual Zoom presentation by Jonathan Alperstein, graduate student at Dartmouth College

There is a general absence of Woodland village sites (~900-1600 CE) in New England’s archaeological record. The lack of these data is due to methodological limitations of current archaeological practices in an understudied region. As a result, the village sites of New England are few and far between. Over the last several decades, there have been widespread calls to do large-scale geophysical surveys to locate village sites in the Northeast. Using a multisensor magnetometry cart, we have completed surveys at a scale and speed that has never been achieved in the region. This survey was conducted within the Historic Oxbow district of the Connecticut River valley between Vermont and New Hampshire. This area is of particular interest as the location of Cowass, a historically recorded settlement of the Cowassuck band of the Western Abenaki, who occupied the region for centuries. After the initial survey, magnetic anomalies of interest received a combination of supplementary geophysical testing (ground-penetrating radar and resistivity) to provide additional data of possible features. These techniques allow us to gain further insight into the village life of the Indigenous Northeast.

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