Roads, Rails, and Trails - Secretary of the Commonwealth

Triangular “Levanna” points were the most common
classifiable stone tool type at both sites.
Of course, the dwellings were not lived in continuously
for thousands of years. They were periodically abandoned or
taken down for months or even years at a time. As evidence for
periodic abandonment the archaeologists found rodent burrows
and the bones of scavengers within the living floors. The
scenario they came up with was that the house would
periodically be abandoned, with food waste left on the floor to
be dealt with by scavenging animals. When people returned
they would set up a new dwelling right on the spot of the old
one. They would set up new posts, coverings for the dwelling,
and furnishings like sleeping platforms. They would cover the
floor with fresh mats. This had the effect of making a great
many postmolds, some distinct, some faint, especially small
ones (the larger support posts were more likely to be reused or
set in the same place), and creating a deep deposit of floor
sediments containing many artifacts. Over the many years of
foot traffic fragile artifacts like pottery, bone, and shell would
be broken into tiny pieces, which is exactly what the
archaeologists found.
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Pottery found inside the dwellings was almost
invariably crushed into very small pieces. Of the more than
1,000 pieces of pottery found at 19-NT-68, very few retained
both exterior and interior surfaces. Most weighed less than
three grams and because they were so tiny they provided
minimal information about ceramic technology. But at 19-NT-
50, the archaeologists got lucky. Here, they found a cluster of
large sherds from a few broken pots that had been disposed of
in a shallow pit outside the dwelling, away from the
pulverizing foot traffic. They were able to fit some of the
sherds together, enough to make the most complete example of
an ancient Native American pot yet found on Nantucket. This
vessel was interesting in that it showed a wide variety of
designs and decorative techniques including lines incised with
a sharp tool to make vertical and horizontal cross hatching
around the rim. Below this was a zone of parallel horizontal
incised lines. Below this zone the pot was decorated with
“rocker stamping” decoration made by rocking a curved,
toothed comb-like tool back and forth on the wet clay.
This shallow pit where broken pots
were discarded outside the dwelling
yielded unusually large potsherds like
this one.