Roads, Rails, and Trails - Secretary of the Commonwealth

THE POLPIS ROAD BICYCLE PATH SITES, NANTUCKET
The Polpis Road Bicycle Path runs just over eight miles
through the eastern part of Nantucket Island, from the center of
Nantucket to the village of Siasconset. The path follows Polpis
Road, but is separated from it to make bicycle travel much
safer.
Nantucket, Massachusetts
An archaeological study of the proposed bicycle path
route was done in 1989 by the Public Archaeology Laboratory,
Inc. (PAL). Background research and preliminary testing
identified thirty-six archaeological sites or “findspots” (isolated
items or scatters of a few artifacts) along the route. Not all of
the thirty-six warranted further investigation; PAL
recommended eight sites for excavation or avoidance.
Avoidance could be difficult. It was not always easy to find a
new route, for example when the road ran right next to a
wetland there was little choice in where to run the bicycle path.
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Eventually, in 1991, PAL under the direction of
archaeologist Mary Lynne Rainey, excavated four important
sites that could not be avoided. These were the first
professional research-oriented digs ever done on Nantucket.
Two of the sites will be discussed below: sites 19-NT-50 and
19-NT-68.
Agreed, these sites don’t exactly have the most
interesting or evocative names. But the archaeological study of
the sites produced very interesting information about centuries
of Native American life on Nantucket before and shortly after
the arrival of European settlers. The sites were named
according to a system that the Smithsonian Institution
developed during the 1940s to give every archaeological site in
the United States a unique designation that would also indicate
its location. The first part of the number—19 in this case—
stands for the state. Massachusetts was nineteenth
alphabetically (before Alaska and Hawaii were added). The
second part—NT—is a county code, in this case Nantucket.
The last part just numbers the sites from one to whatever as
new sites are reported. So these site “names” actually contain
some basic information, though they may lack poetry. The sites
were the fiftieth and sixty-eighth sites to be reported from
Nantucket County, Massachusetts.
The two sites were found in different areas along the
route of the path. But both were in similar kinds of locations
and both contained the remnants of a Native American
dwelling. The excavation methods were somewhat unusual.
The archaeologists established a grid over the sites and
excavated several one- or two-meter squares (about 10% of the
site area) with hand tools, screening all soils through wire mesh
to recover small items, recording the precise locations of