12,000 Years of Local History

The Ice Age:

Our story begins at the end of the Ice Age, some 12,000 years ago, when the giant ice sheet that reached Long Island, Nantucket, and Martha’s Vineyard began to recede northwards. The landscape of Massachusetts looked quite different than today as the melting glacier left behind an arctic tundra with many little lakes and ponds across Massachusetts. The Atlantic coastline was more than 11 miles East of its current border. During this time, when the environment was significantly colder than it is today, many animals that are now extinct, including mammoths and mastodons, roamed the land.

The Paleoindian Period:

Over the next 1,000 years, a gentle warming of the temperature encouraged new animals and plants to populate the area, and along with it, the arrival of New England's earliest known human occupants. Archaeological evidence from this historical period, known as the Paleoindian period (12,000 - 9,000 years ago), shows that small, continuously mobile groups followed caribou and deer herds across the landscape. Stone artifacts show that these people could easily travel more than 100 miles as part of their hunting and materials gathering range. One such temporary hunting camp has been found at Bull Brook in Ipswich. While we don’t know of any Paleoindian sites within the current boundaries of Natick, we can assume that these people likely moved through here from time to time.

The Archaic Period:

The beginning of the Archaic period (9,000 - 3,000 years ago) is marked by a wetter and, fortunately, still, even warmer climate, which encouraged spruce forests and wetlands to replace the tundra slowly. During the Archaic, people lived in relatively small camps, moving seasonally across the landscape as animals and plants in the forest, rivers, and marshlands were available. Around 7,000 years ago, the climate had become dry and warm enough to support a mixed oak and hemlock forest teaming with animals and edible plants, including deer, otter, beaver, rabbit, squirrel, and turkey. Archaeologists have found many sites dating to the Archaic Period across New England and think that the human population grew during this time due to the milder climate and richness of available food sources. Archaic sites are most frequently found along bodies of water like rivers, lakes, and streams, suggesting that they were strategically placed for residents to take advantage of prime hunting, fishing, and plant-gathering opportunities. 

Tools from these sites show a solid connection to the water that people lived for extended periods in one place and ate a greater variety of foodstuffs. In addition to cutting tools and spear points used for hunting and butchering mammals and birds, fishing weirs (wood and stone funneling systems for trapping large numbers of migrating fish in narrows along a stream) and fishing net weights have been found at these sites. Woodworking tools for shaping cutout canoes, building house structures, and creating various miscellaneous day-to-day objects are also common. With the greater variety of nuts and seeds available in the lush forests of this time, grinding stones became a necessary item in many campsites. Containers for cooking, serving, and storing food were carved out of soapstone or woven from birch bark. By studying the origin of the stones that were used to make tools at Archaic sites, archaeologists believe that Native peoples during this era lived within small, relatively narrow foraging territories that were bounded by drainages. The Natick Historical Society has a variety of Archaic Era artifacts in its collection. These donations from locals discovered these tools on their land several thousand years after their former owners had left them behind. These tools tell us Native people were living here in Natick, hunting in the forests that covered the land where the town is today and fishing from the river (called Quinobequin by the Algonquin and the Charles by colonists) right outside the Natick History Museum.

The Woodland Period:

The Woodland Period (3,000 - 450 years ago) marks a dramatic shift in the lifestyle of people who lived in this area, including the creation of ceramic vessels, the invention of the bow and arrow, a transition to a more sedentary way of life, and the development of agriculture and farming. Woodland-era people lived in semi-permanent villages and used smaller outlying sites to acquire specific resources, not unlike how some families today have a hunting camp in the rural countryside that they visit in the fall to hunt ducks or deer, or a beach house on the ocean that they see in the summer to swim, and sun, and go clamming! They replaced the spear and atlatl (a throwing spear) with the bow and arrow, a weapon with better accuracy and more power. While it is likely that Native peoples were strategically selecting, encouraging, and weeding plants over the last several thousand years, it wasn’t until the Woodland Period, and more specifically after 1,000 years ago, that they developed full-fledged agriculture, using slash and burn technique, to grow squash, gourds, corn and other wild plants that produced edible seeds. Storage pits lined with bark and grasses have been found at archaeological sites, indicating that communities stockpiled surplus food for periods of scarcity. Pottery probably began at the end of the Archaic period but became widespread at sites in the area around 2,000 years ago. To make ceramic artifacts, local clay was collected and cleaned before being coiled and smoothed into shapes, then hardened and baked in open fires. Woven plant materials were pressed into the outside of these first pots to make them look like woven baskets, but over time, pottery took on its artistic style and was decorated with incised and pecked mark designs.

By 3,000 years ago, the shoreline had receded to match, more or less, where our coastline is today. Because many Woodland sites in Massachusetts are on the Cape or along the coast, there is a greater focus on sea resources than in the previous eras. Given how close Natick is to the coast, it is likely that our area would still have had both permanent occupants as well as occasional seasonal visitors.

European Contact and Beyond:

By the time the first Europeans arrived in North America, around 1500 AD, the population of Native peoples living across the landscape had reached the tens of thousands. These people belonged to many different tribes, including Massachusett, Wampanoag, and Nipmuck, who all spoke different languages and dialects but were part of a single Algonquian language family. 

Recent excavations of the Sarah Burnee-Sarah Boston Homestead in present-day Grafton have shed light on Native life in the Colonial era.  A Nipmuc family occupied this homestead for several generations. The presence of Archaic-era artifacts found just outside the home shows the importance of this land to Native communities for more than 6,000 years. Of the more than 150,000 artifacts found at the site, perhaps the most interesting are several stone tools and flakes that show that this family continued to use traditional materials and techniques despite having access to Euro-American technology and trade items.

While archaeologists and historians have begun to piece together a tiny sliver of what the past was like, many unanswered questions need exploring by future history detectives. When we combine archaeological and historical study with Tribal knowledge and histories, we can paint a more cohesive picture of the past.  We invite you to visit the tribal websites of our local Algonquin tribes to learn how they tell the history of their ancestors in their own words.

To learn more about 12,000 years of local history, visit our timeline.

By: Rebecca Sgouros