Yes, it was indeed April Fools Day, but no spoof. Finally, spring had sprung, and the cock cardinal sitting in the burning bush off the inset porch was announcing it to the neighborhood, his joyous morning melody brightening the clear, pleasant air before fading off into infinite clear-blue sky.

I celebrated the event by doubling my morning walk over March-brown, soggy splatter — oh, how the dogs loved it. Previously, I had already aired out the barn and house by opening doors and windows, an exhilarating, annual rite of spring, especially opening my home, which had absorbed a long, cold, confining winter that it needed to relieve itself of. The forecast called for three beautiful days. Splendid! I was more than ready for it and would venture a guess that I wasn’t alone.

And wouldn’t you know it: speaking of harbingers of spring, there in my inbox sat an email announcing the first spring-trout-stocking round by MassWildlife’s Western District office, a notice that arrived a day after an online press-release from the agency’s Westborough Field Headquarters announcing statewide stocking was underway. Which, allow me to digress for a moment, reminds me how much I now enjoy the newfound freedom to write that word, underway, as one instead of two, thanks to high-ranking Associated Press windbags who recently met at some posh hotel to arbitrarily decide it was time to change the style from under way to underway. Trust me, within 20 years it’ll go back to two words. Who knows? Maybe I won’t live to see it, but it’s coming — as soon as the insecure Lourdes of Style finally become so painfully inflated with air of self-importance that they’ll have to release the discomforting buildup with an explosive new and irrelevant style-change that stinks to the high heavens and makes absolutely no difference in the world of reading comprehension. But enough of that. No, not another millisecond of pointless and quite disrespectful digression. Onto something that matters, like, for instance, Lake Hitchcock’s ancient drainage some 14,000 or 15,000 years ago, a subject I cannot seem to shake as I travel our Pioneer Valley and analyze its bottomland contours, many of them soupy cattail marshes and alder swamps I’ve followed my flushing gun-dogs through in search of sporting game birds, maybe even waterfowl back in the days when lead-shot was still legal for both.

I must say I’m pleased how new information about an old, familiar place called home can radically change my perspective. Still mired in Pioneer Valley prehistory these days, my crosshairs are centered on the overlap Franklin-Hampshire delta between Mts. Sugarloaf and Toby on the north and Holyoke and Tom on the south. In between those ranges stands solitary Mt. Warner, named after a transplanted English family that arrived in the Connecticut Valley five centuries ago to become a thread in my genealogical quilt. Millennia before those immigrant Warners migrated upriver from Hartford to Hadley with the followers of Wethersfield’s Rev. John Russell, the distinctive peak standing across the river from The Bashin and the old Hatfield Oxbow stood as a small pointed island protruding between the aforementioned neighboring ranges, which were also islands surrounded by the vast, 200-mile-long pro-glacial Lake Hitchcock, which extended roughly from St. Johnsbury, Vt., to Middletown, Conn. It was there, at a place now known as Rocky Hill, where a natural dam finally burst deep in our history, opening a fertile valley to human habitation. At least, that’s the conventional wisdom. Others believe a sparse population of pre-Clovis migrants may have found their way here from warmer southern climates, arriving in the Northeast 1,000 years before Lake Hitchcock drained.

Evidence of pre-Paleo occupation has been found in the lower Hudson Valley at the Dutchess Quarry Caves (DQC) near Middletown, N.Y. Those caves would have overlooked pro-glacial Lake Albany, which was contemporaneous to and about 100 miles west of Lake Hitchcock in these parts. Archaeological research conducted there in the Sixties and Seventies by R.E. Funk, D.W. Steadman and others unearthed Cumberland points, Indian artifacts associated with the Southeast and never before or since found in the Northeast. For that matter, to this day not a single artifact of this style has ever been recovered from the Albany Lake bed. All of them came from the highlands looking down on the old lake.

Veteran Paleo researcher Dr. Richard M. Gramly, who goes by Mike, was a DQC participant and led a recent Connecticut Valley Paleo excavation on the southern skirt of Mt. Sugarloaf. There, calcine bone fragments dug from the sandy soil were carbon dated as 12,350 years old. Gramly says there’s no reason to doubt that bands of the same pre-Clovis people who left hints of their presence in southeastern New York were here in the Connecticut Valley, too, in limited numbers. Such a claim is difficult to float in this academically rich valley, though, due primarily of two formidable obstacles standing in the way of unraveling the mystery: 1.) pre-eminent retired UMass anthropologist/archaeologist Dr. Dena F. Dincauze and her minions championed the Clovis-first North American human-settlement theory and have not been open to alternative hypotheses, and 2.) the Pioneer Valley mountains and their hidden rock shelters, which may well hold pre-Clovis evidence, have been largely ignored by archaeologists because of strenuous labor associated with upland digs.

Gramly, a bundle of energy, intellectual curiosity and self-confidence, is not hesitant to speak frankly about what is wrong with archaeology and his pet peeve, cultural-resource management. In personal communication, Gramly wrote: “It is only via physically challenging efforts that pre-Clovis human presence in and around pro-glacial Lake Hitchcock will ever be laid bare. Academics working from the comforts of cushy armchairs will not produce the data you seek. One must sweat and risk pinched toes and fingers, or worse. The labors at the DQC are in the best tradition of scientific archaeology and were carried out by real researchers who understand that ‘pure imagining’ or ‘hollow hypothesizing’ are inadequate. Musings must be followed by fieldwork.”

Not only that, but after fieldwork is completed, the findings should be published in a timely fashion to accelerate discovery through interactive research that brings many voices and opinions to the table. From what I’ve observed during what is approaching two year’s worth of aggressive information-gathering, cooperation among rival researchers is rare indeed. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that researchers with similar aims intentionally conceal important information from each other in the race to ultimately “own” ground-breaking discovery.

A case in point focuses on the Whately Oxbow, discovered and first written about by Dr. Marjorie Holland in the 1970s as a UMass graduate student. Her subsequent Smith College doctoral dissertation on the western Massachusetts oxbows, plus related papers co-written with Smith professor/mentor Dr. John Burk and published in scholarly journals, were likely the impetus for a paper on Paleo Lakes of the Connecticut Valley co-authored by UMass archaeologists Mary Lou Curran and Dincauze. Those are only the papers I am aware of on the subject. There are undoubtedly others I have no knowledge of, even though I do thoroughly study bibliographies and footnotes.

When I asked Holland a couple of months ago why the pollen dates associated with Whately were so vague in her oxbow papers, she explained that only the Northampton Oxbow had been pollen dated, and that sampling the other two “would be a great project for someone up there.” Then, when introduced by Gramly to more recent Paleo-site pollen studies conducted by independent former Yale researcher Dr. Lucinda McWeeney, I wondered aloud why she hadn’t visited Whately and Hatfield to gather samples that could be compared to other New England sites, including one in nearby Swanzey, N.H. It made no sense to me that communication was so poor among top researchers in the field.

It gets better, and far more twisted. During the recent reading of a fresh archaeological report focused on Kellogg Hill in Hatfield, I discovered, lo and behold, that McWeeney had indeed been in the area to analyze ancient vegetation surrounding the state-permitted UMass dig of an Indian village site. Why, when here, hadn’t she taken exploratory samples at the two nearby oxbows aching for answers? I wanted to email her and alert her to Gramly’s recent Sugarloaf dig, maybe even suggest that she might want to sample the Whately Oxbow as a related project, but I was afraid of stepping on toes, too many to mention in one breath. A day or two later, an excited Gramly phoned me to say he had been in contact with McWeeney, who had taken Whately Oxbow pollen samples that revealed radiocarbon dates of 9,300 and 8,600, which translates to a ballpark figure of 11,300 and 10,600 calendar years before present. Hmmmm? Why didn’t my Smith College source know of these dates? Had they been published anywhere? And even if they were not published, you’d think someone may have hit me with an email when a few weeks back I taunted Amherst’s Five-College Consortium to get it together for further research at the site? Then, late last week I learned that at least preliminary testing had been performed there and kept quiet. Can someone please explain how that kind of secrecy is in any way beneficial to science and discovery?

If the silence was broken and the voices were united in a public forum, I think we’d all be stunned at how fast this prehistoric Pioneer Valley puzzle would come together. In the meantime, just rumors and whispers that “insiders” are surreptitiously and quite privately working the hot spots in the dark of night, and selling important artifacts to faraway collectors who pay top dollar, removing their prizes from their homes and forever clouding local history.

It seems to me that there’s a lot of blame to go around, including the officials who scream the loudest in favor of secrecy to prevent looting. What they don’t tell you is that many of the very best archaeological pilferers have come straight from their classes and field schools before venturing off on their own.

It’s a fact.

Put that in your sumac-stemmed pipe and smoke it.

It wasn’t the oh-so familiar yet faded scene — a dark, dingy basement classroom in the bowels of UMass’ Bartlett Hall — that left an impression on me. No, no, no! It was the Coppertone man, a long, thin and tidy braid splitting his back between the scapulae.

The man’s name was Doug Harris, preservationist for ceremonial landscapes at the Narragansett Indian Tribal Historic Preservation Office in Wyoming, R.I.; he was in Amherst that cool, windy, spring day to introduce a movie to UMass anthropology undergrads. It was, coincidentally, the same film shown this past Saturday at the Great Falls Discovery Center in Turners Falls. Titled “Great Falls: Discovery, Destruction and Preservation in a Massachusetts Town,” the documentary focuses on the infamous Turners Falls Airport dispute and chronicles the rich history and prehistory of Peskeomskut, the sacred falls and gathering place for native tribes drawn to the site each spring to savor bounteous anadromous fish runs up a hard, turbulent Connecticut River elbow.

Harris was setting the stage for the afternoon viewing by cautioning students they’d learn from archaeologists that our continent was peopled by ancient migrations over the land bridge connecting Alaska to Asia, and still others from South and Central America. “It’s true,” he stated in eloquent baritone, “but we welcomed them both.”

That statement I will never forget. And now, given what we’ve learned from recent DNA analysis of bones discovered in the grave of a 1-year-old Clovis boy buried 12,700 years ago in western Montana, it appears he knew what he was talking about. The Clovis Boy’s DNA profile eliminated the possibility of European genes, confirmed markers from Asia and South and Central America, and revealed genomes unique to Native American people unrelated to Inuit tribes of the north. What it all means to us here in the Pioneer Valley — where ongoing Paleo exploration led by archaeologist Mike Gramly is ripe, fresh and quite contagious — is at this time unclear. But the threadbare theory that Paleo man (and, of course, woman) vanished and was replaced by a newer breed of cat that appeared during the Archaic and Woodland eras, appears invalid, which makes perfect sense to a rank amateur believing in evolution as I do. To the scholars who loudly proclaimed that the Contact Period tribes encountered by the first European explorers had no genealogical link to Paleo people, I have from the start suspected a problem I first heard described by a Buckland hayseed named Hezekiah. He diagnosed this all-too-common flaw as “too much college and not enough grammar school.” What a hoot. Try that on for size. You gotta love it.

I first saw mention of Clovis Boy — called Anzick-1 — whose bones represent the lone human Paleo specimen ever discovered on this continent or the one south of us, in an Associated Press story last Thursday in The Recorder. From there, still intrigued after observing a fascinating, two-week, September Gramly dig at the base of Mt. Sugarloaf, I chased down the online “Nature” magazine article the news report had been gleaned from. I read it, called Gramly and asked him if it was possible that another human Paleo bone could be unearthed from the sandy plain below Sugarloaf. He called it unlikely “because I think these people’s burial site would have been elsewhere but nearby.” He even identified the location, which I choose not to here disclose for fear of random, amateur exploration and destruction of a potentially ground-breaking local site of worldwide importance. But I can say, knowing the terrain as I do, that his assessment makes perfect sense, and that the site itself has always glittered with mystery.

Howard Clark, the Nolumbeka Project anthropologist/historian who’s often maligned in the press as an Indian “activist,” was trained at San Francisco State University, where the peopling of North America was viewed through a 50,000-year or more window. So he was encouraged but not surprised by this recent finding that places people on this continent long before the Clovis Culture, which shows up as fluted points in an archaeological record across North America dating back 13,000 years.

“To be honest, given what I had learned on the West Coast, I was surprised to arrive here and discover that archaeologists believed it all started with the Clovis Culture,” he said. “That’s not what we were taught out west. Now, according to the Nature article, it’s clear to me that there were people in North and South America long before 13,000 years ago,” and even suggestive of a race that can truly be called Native American.

Where does he get his information? Look no further than the recent “Nature” piece titled “The Genome of a Late Pleistocene human from a Clovis burial site in western Montana,” which states: “Our data are compatible with the hypothesis that Anzick-1 belonged to a population directly ancestral to many contemporary Native Americans. Finally, we find evidence of a deep divergence in Native American populations that predates the Anzick-1 individual.”

News of this finding has gone viral. If you don’t believe it, check it out on the Internet. And you can take it to the bank that many respected researchers are now scrambling to make sense of it all and find a way to save face while retracting prior statements made with haughty self-assurance. It goes with the territory. I suppose that’s why the wisest sources always speak with a speck of uncertainty and a glint of humility.

The alternative can get embarrassing.



On a related matter teased to last week here, only a miniscule percentage of local stone was found among 25 pounds of chipped debitage collected from a biface-production yard at the 12,350-year-old Sugarloaf Site excavated by Gramly. The vast majority (96 percent) of the stone chips recovered were Normanskill chert from the Hudson Valley, while nearly all of the remaining four percent was felsite (some from Mt. Jasper in Berlin, N.H.). But Gramly says the sample size was far too small to make any assumptions just yet.

“You have to remember that I now believe the Sugarloaf Site could be the largest fluted-point habitation site in North America,” he said. “We have only sampled a small portion it. These Paleo caribou hunters loved their Normanskill chert, preferred it and were willing to travel for it, but this latest finding does show these people were also bringing in local lithic sources. My guess is that they used the local stone for specific tools. So we may yet get into loci where the percentage of local stone is significantly higher than where we’ve already studied.”

David “Bud” Driver, an amateur archaeologist from South Deerfield by way of the Northampton Meadows, was the man who researched and ultimately led UMass archaeologists to an ancient quarry of Mt. Tom stone he named Rocheen Dalby Chert after his mother-in-law. The site had previously been identified as an ancient lithic source earlier during the 20th century by well-known amateur archaeologist Walter S. Rodimon (1885-1972), also of Northampton. But perhaps the man who led Rodimon to the quarry overlooking Northampton’s picturesque Oxbow from the south and west was noted Springfield historian Harry Andrew Wright, who studied early Pioneer Valley Indian deeds and place names. In this line of research, Wright came across the earliest mention of the name Mt. Tom on a 1662 deed from Joseph Parsons to Aaron Cook (my ninth great-grandfather), nine years after Northampton was purchased from Indians. He explains in his Sept. 1939 paper titled “Some Vagaries in Connecticut Valley Indian Place Names,” (The New England Quarterly) why he suspects an Indian origin for the name Mt. Tom, opining: “The mountain is composed of trap rock, the material from which the Indians frequently made their tomahawks. The Connecticut Indians called this rock tomhegnompsk (“tomahawk rock”); and tomheganomset, the south boundary of Sequasson’s territory on the west side of the Connecticut River, meant “at the tomahawk rock.” Although Wright could not prove this interesting discovery was related to the mountain’s name, he believed it more likely than folklore claiming it was named in honor of pioneer Rowland Thomas, an early and prominent Springfield resident.

Driver and UConn lithics scholar Barbara Calogero collaborated in 2007 on their “Rodimon’s Mt. Tom Quarry Site” report for the Massachusetts Historical Commission (MHC), then wrote an article, “Mount Tom Cherts and Assocoiated Lithics, Connecticut Valley, Massachusetts” in the spring 2009 issue of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society “Bulletin.” The definitive MHC report on file was authored in April 2006 by UMass anthropologist Michael T. Mulholland and four of his students. Driver first explored the site before the year 2000, even bringing with him an expert knapper to sample the workability of the local stone; he found it difficult to chip but marveled at the fine edge he could produce by grinding and honing, which speaks to Gramly’s earlier comment about the local stone’s potential use for specialized tools, perhaps knives or scrapers.

“I can only say it’s a good thing Bud found that source and pursued it, because had he not, we’d be puzzled by what we found at Sugarloaf,” said an appreciative Gramly, who’s totally committed to interpreting the site before disappearing to Cautantowwit’s House in the land of the setting sun.

Don’t bet against this energetic, enthusiastic man of science. This story just keeps growing and getting better. There’s no end in sight.