Roads, Rails, and Trails - Secretary of the Commonwealth

The Annasnappet Pond Sites, Carver
In the late 1970s, The Massachusetts Department of
Transportation (then known as the Massachusetts Department
of Public Works) began planning improvements to Route 44.
This road is a major east-west transportation route, running
from Plymouth through Taunton and ultimately to Providence,
Rhode Island. The route was narrow and meandering in places,
and the planned alterations were designed to cut travel time and
improve safety. Archaeological testing began with a group
from Harvard University’s Institute for Conservation
Archaeology (ICA), who began testing several alternative
routes in the fall and early winter of 1978. The ICA
archaeologists found several ancient sites around Annasnappet
Pond, a large complex of cranberry bogs surrounded by sandy
knolls in a rural part of the town of Carver.
Carver, Massachusetts
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Annasnappet comes from the Wampanoag word
meaning “at the source of the stream,” and the pond is the
headwater of Annasnappet Brook, whose waters eventually
flow into the Taunton River and then into Mount Hope Bay
and Rhode Island Sound. It was an attractive and comfortable
place to live in ancient times. There was a spring that ran yearround,
providing drinking water for the people and attracting
game animals to the area. It was surrounded by sandy knolls
and terraces. The dry sandy soils made for comfortable
dwelling places that did not get muddy in rainy weather.
Annasnappet Pond has been used for cranberry bogs for
more than 100 years. Unfortunately, cranberry bog
maintenance involves regularly spreading sand over the bogs,
and some of the sites on the sandy knolls had been destroyed
because they had been quarried for sand over the years. Further
study of the sites showed that some had been badly damaged,
but others had not yet been disturbed. The highway planners
tried to avoid as many of the intact sites as they could, but it
was not possible to avoid all of them. Between 1992 and 1995
four of the sites were excavated by the Public Archaeology
Laboratory, Inc. (PAL).
The PAL archaeologists made some amazing
discoveries. Many of the sites around the bog dated from a time
that archaeologists call the “Middle Archaic” period, about
8,000 to 9,000 years ago. Among the discoveries from that
period was the oldest human burial ever discovered in
Massachusetts, and possibly in all of New England (more than
8,000 years old!). The burial included cremated human bone,
red ochre (a powdery red pigment made by grinding up pieces
of an iron mineral called hematite), two stone spear points, and
polished stone weights that were once part of spear throwers
that had long since disintegrated.