The Site / The Project
The Ellsworth Falls project was the beginning of a long collaboration between Wendell Hadlock (left), of the Abbe Museum and Douglas Byers (right), director of the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology, Andover, Massachusetts.
The first radiocarbon dates in the Northeast for the Archaic Period were obtained from Ellsworth Falls. Three dates were run on charcoal samples and the results ranged between 4,100 and 3,400 years ago. These dates were much earlier than anyone had previously expected.
At Ellsworth Falls archaeologists identified and dated a sequence of layers of cultural occupations extending from colonial times back thousands of years.
Radiocarbon dating is the single most useful method employed by archaeologists to date sites or occupation levels within sites.
What did they want to know?
By the 1940s, archaeologists were interested in going beyond excavating single sites to putting together the chronology of cultures within a geographic region.
“How old are the sites and what is the sequence of cultures?”
What have we learned?
Byers and Hadlock identified four occupations in the Ellsworth Falls sequence. Byers named each occupation and identified a characteristic assemblage of tools and technologies.
Today, Byers's named sequences from Ellsworth Falls are not used, but his basic chronology of changes in tool types is still used as a framework for understanding cultural chronology.
What did they find?
Archaic Period
Ceramic Period
Historic Period
Stratigraphy
References:
The Eastern Archaic: Some Problems And Hypotheses. Douglas S. Byers. American Antiquity Vol. 24, No. 3, 1954.
The Contributions of Wendell S. Hadlock to the Pre-European Archaeology of Maine. David Sanger. Maine Archaeological Society Bulletin, Vol. 45, No. 2, 2005.