Was cleaning out my grandpa's attic in Vermont and found a 1920s field journal from an archaeologist

Honestly, I thought it was just some old notebook until I flipped to the middle and saw sketches of a dig site near Lake Champlain. Turns out this guy was recording stuff about a pre-colonial fishing village they uncovered in 1923. Ngl, it had detailed notes on pottery fragments and stone tools, with a mention of a site called "The Point" that I can't find in any modern records. Has anyone else ever stumbled on old field notes that changed how you view a local site?

2 comments

2 Comments

brian_rivera5913d ago

My buddy found something similar in his grandpa's barn in Maine a couple years back. It was old field notes from the 1930s about a shell midden site near the coast that nobody seemed to remember. He spent like two months cross-referencing old maps and talking to local historians. Turned out the site was actually on state land but had been mislabeled in a survey from the 50s. He ended up helping a grad student relocate it for a new study, pretty wild how stuff just gets forgotten like that.

lane.eric13d ago

Idk if this is totally accurate but I think the 1923 dig might not be as lost as you think. The Lake Champlain area has a lot of smaller sites that got documented by amateur archaeologists back then, and some of them just never got added to the state records because the paperwork got lost or the dig wasn't officially approved. Maybe check with the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation, they keep old reports from random digs that people forget about. The 'The Point' name could be a local term that the digger used, not the official site name, so it might be on maps under something totally different now.