Bulletin of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society, Vol. 25, No. 3 ...

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bull-dozed, Karlsefni's palisade was an oval. Post­
Columbian maps show oval or rectangular palisades
around rows of houses of stave construction (Fig.
16), as the "means of fortifying against the Mohawks."
Each house had a central fireplace, with a
hole in the thatched roof for the escape of smoke.
For the first several decades the New England
Colonists knew nothing of cabins with horizontallylaid
logs, until they learned from the Swedes on
the Delaware how to build them.
Fig. 16. FORTIFICATION AGAINST THE MOHAWKS, from a map
of 1642.
Inside the palisades and towns, there was need
of quick action in self-defense. A hair-raising story
is told of how in Dorchester one Sunday morning,
"in Sermon Time," a maid servant was at home with
two young children, and the door barred for safety.
Seeing an Indian about to come in at the window,
the maid put the children under two brass kettles,
and fired a musket at the Indian. He fired and hit
one of the kettles "and shot the child into the
shoulder." He then put down his gun and began
climbing in at the window, but the maid got a fire
shovel full of live coals and applied them to his
face, and he fled. The next day an Indian with
face burned was found dead five miles away.
All New England Colonists could not of course
live within palisades. Many had to live outside,
as hunters, trappers, traders, and farmers. The
farmers could not all do as the Dutch of New
Amsterdam did in venturing out from the safety of
Fort Amsterdam each morning, crossing the East
River in rowboats to the west end of Long Island,
cultivating their crops there under constant armed
guard, and returning to Fort Amsterdam before
dark. New England farmers were compelled to
take frightful chances. A lone settler in New England
in the first half-century tried to establish
friendly relations with the local Indians, speaking
as much of their language as he could. At best he
lived in perpetual terror, with his wife and children
and himself potential victims at any moment day or
night; he knew no security.
MASSACHUSETTS ARCHAEOLOGICAL SOCIETY
His dwelling was a half-cellar or hole in the
ground about 4 feet deep with the excavated dirt
built up in a wall for another two feet. Poles across
the top supported tree boughs, moss, or straw
thatch. Such a dwelling could not be defended.
Indians could easily break a hole in the thatch and
drop in some burning boughs and smoke the
family out.
It may shock some Americans to learn that
many of their boasted ancestors lived in holes in
the ground, but in their so doing, those ancestors
were the more heroic. In anyone region, the first
outlying dwelling to be attacked without warning
had no survivors, unless by lucky chance one of the
family was not at home. If there was such a survivor
he would run and warn other settlers that
Indians were on the rampage. More usual warnings
were gunshots, sounds of which would carry long
distances. The families who received warning
would promptly flee from their dwellings.
Today in back woods of New England we
come across strange stone structures in the shape of
beehives. Four of these "beehives" were visited and
studied in May of 1963 by an archaeological group,
which had been organized by two men. They held
a theory that the makers of what tourists know as
the "Mystery Hill" structures at North Salem, New
Hampshire, which suggest to some a Bronze-Age
origin, had also been the makers, or had been associated
with the makers of the many "beehives" in
Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Three of the
beehives we studied are within 10 miles of Deerfield,
and the other is 14 miles from Deerfield. One
is beyond a wood road on a steep hillside near West
Leyden; one is in Montague Township; one is at
the foot of Mineral Mountain Road in Shutesbury;
and the fourth is about 75 feet from a small cemetery
in Pelham.
These four beehives in the Deerfield region
resemble each other so closely in form and dimen-
Fig. 17. CROSS SECTION OF BEEHIVE, showing opening,
corbelling, slope of ground, and hummock.