Roads, Rails, and Trails - Secretary of the Commonwealth

The Foundry Pond Site, Hingham
A priority in transportation planning for the twenty-first
century is developing or expanding mass transit to reduce
automobile congestion, noise, urban air pollution, sprawl, and
greenhouse gas emissions. These are all laudable goals, but the
expense of building commuter rail systems to cities can be
challenging. One solution to this challenge is to restore existing
abandoned railroad beds for new commuter rails. That was the
plan for the Greenbush line, an eighteen-mile commuter rail
system linking the south shore towns of Braintree, Weymouth,
Hingham, Cohasset, and Scituate to Boston along routes once
traveled by the Old Colony Railroad.
Hingham, Massachusetts
Could such a project actually affect archaeological
sites? It was possible; restoring the old railroad beds would
require some work that would disturb the ground both within
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the old rights-of way and in adjacent areas. The old railroad
beds are massive deposits of crushed rock and other fill that
supported the old tracks. In some places these old beds would
need new or rebuilt subsurface drainage structures or retaining
walls, and this would require digging beneath the old fill. But
could archaeological sites actually survive under the old
railroad beds? Wouldn’t they have been destroyed during the
original construction? How would the archaeologists know
where to look and how would they search for the sites?
How do you know where to dig? Archaeologists hear
that question again and again. The answer is simple. They
review where sites have been found before. In the same way a
football coach reviews video of an opponent’s previous games
to be able to predict what plays they will run in certain
situations, archaeologists review the locations of known sites to
predict what kinds of places are likely to contain as yet
undiscovered sites. Ancient Native American sites are usually
found on level land, not far from water, where the soil is not
wet or overly rocky. For this project there was, of course,
another consideration: were the sites destroyed when the
original railroad was built? Fortunately the archaeologists had
information to help them answer that question. Soil borings
that had been done to evaluate the condition of the railroad
beds also showed whether or not there were intact soils beneath
the fill. In a surprising number of places the old fill had just
been piled right on top of the ground surface and any sites
would still be there, albeit maybe a bit compressed.
In 2004, archaeologists from University of
Massachusetts Archaeological Services studied the soil borings
and the locations, and pinpointed some places that warranted
testing. Once the old railroad bed was removed they began
excavating. Sure enough, they found some ancient Native