It’s not easy to find and excavate sites in far northern Maine. The dense forests are difficult to get around in. While most sites are located close to the waterways, archaeologists need to get to them. This means long drives on logging roads where huge trucks and moose can pose hazards. The summers are short and insect pests are intense.
Archaeological sites in the interior tend to be small and shallow, as compared to coastal shell middens. Because bones do not generally preserve in the acidic soils, we have less information on how people were living away from the coast. Only burned bone fragments are recovered and these are sometimes too small to be identified.
Most sites are also very shallow, because there is very little new material added to northern forest soils. So, this means that thousands of years of time may be compressed into a few inches of soil.
In 1928, the Abbe Museum became the first institution in Maine to support archaeological research. Today, that tradition continues with ongoing research, testing and the annual field school. In this exhibit you will visit a few of the sites that the Abbe has excavated since 1928.
Discover what the archaeologists set out to learn and what information they actually uncovered. View artifacts, illustrations and photographs from each site.
Select a site to visit:
This online exhibition is excerpted from "Layers of Time: Archaeology at the Abbe Museum." This show, featuring more than a dozen sites and several hundred artifacts, is currently on view at the Abbe Museum in downtown Bar Harbor. The Abbe Museum at Sieur de Monts Spring features a complementary exhibition of early archaeological collections.