Written in Stone: Lithic Analysis at the Acushnet LNG Site

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Acushnet LNG Site is a multicomponent Native American campsite located on the Brayton Point peninsula in southeastern Massachusetts. Brayton Point extends into Mount Hope Bay and is at the confluence of the Lee and Taunton rivers, an area with numerous documented Native American sites. The Public Archaeology Laboratory, Inc. (PAL) identified the Acushnet LNG site and determined it to be a minimum of 71,000 square meters in size. Diagnostic artifacts and the results of radiocarbon dating indicate that the site was occupied from the Early Archaic through Middle Woodland Periods. The recovered artifact assemblage consists of lithic tools and debitage, fauna and flora remains, fire-cracked rock, and raw materials manuports. Recovered chipped stone tools were predominately bifaces with lesser amounts of projectile points, utilized flakes, scrapers, an adz, drill, knife, and preform. In addition, nearly 7,000 pieces of lithic debitage and non-chipped stone tools, including a plummet, abrader, nutting stones, a grinding stone, and groundstone fragments, were recovered during the investigations. The Acushnet LNG site is a significant Native American campsite during the pre-contact period, and a valuable resource with the potential to provide new information about Native American settlement patterns along the Mount Hope Bay.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24941