From Turners Falls to the Vernon, Vt., Dam, the banks of the Connecticut River are the subject of an archaeological study that has been going on for two weeks now.
The study is part of the First Light power company’s relicensing process with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. First Light owns the Northfield Mountain pumped storage power facility and the Turners Falls Dam. First Light spokesman Len Greene said that the company’s relicensing has been going on for almost seven years, and the whole process typically takes up to eight years.
Part of the relicensing is an accounting of the cultural resources that could, if left undiscovered, be damaged by the power company’s operations. Around the Connecticut River, the findings of such a study will inevitably include evidence of pre-colonial civilization.
“If projects are to happen anywhere along the river, for utilities or otherwise, there’s an accounting that has to happen with those projects,” said Joe Graveline, who is on the Northfield Historical Commission and is a former president of the Nolumbeka Project, an organization that promotes knowledge of New England’s native cultures.
“You might choose to move a project 200 yards in a different direction in order to avoid a burial ground or a village site,” Graveline said. “If you don’t have a sense of what’s here and keep the records up to date, it’s difficult to have an understanding of what kinds of mitigation measures a new project might require.”
The workers dig pits every seven meters, 50 centimeters square and one meter deep, Greene said. The excavated soil is screened through mesh. When artifacts are found they are sent to a lab, and the location is earmarked for more thorough study. All the information is used for the site’s listing in the National Register of Historic Places.
“The object is to make sure they’re not missing any cultural horizons,” Graveline said. A cultural horizon, he explained, is a surface where humans settled for enough time to leave evidence of some kind. Because the land around the river shifts over time, with silt being deposited and washed away regularly, there could be multiple cultural horizons on top of one another, separated by layers of soil.
“People were gathering on the river in clans and in tribal affiliations, and they hunkered down year after year in these different areas,” Graveline said. “They (First Light) are trying to identify those and see how far they go and what time periods they covered.”
The findings are supplemented by archaeology from the Massachusetts Historical Commission, as well as from local collections like the Northfield Library and the Nolumbeka Project, Graveline said.
“MHC (the Massachusetts Historical Commission) only provides permitted work that’s occurred,” Graveline said. “They don’t always know what’s discovered when a farmer plows his fields and the artifacts come up.”
Greene said that the survey will likely be finished within the week. To prevent people from interfering in the study, the locations of the test sites could not be shared.
However, Graveline said, members of native tribes recognized by the federal or state government have a right to show up and oversee the work.
“The word is that they’re doing a very nice job,” Graveline said. “That makes a difference for me, for a tribal person to say that the quality of the archaeology is good.”
Contact Max Marcus at mmarcus@recorder.com or 413-772-0261 ex 261.