Chatham, MA- September 9, 2009 : Accompanying Photos
When 21-month old Ethan Seufert scrambled over a boulder with his toy boat at the edge of Chatham’s Goose Pond last week he discovered what may be one of the most visible remains of the Monomoyick Native Americans who were the sole residents of Chatham for 15,000 years or so.
Ethan’s dad, photographer Christopher Seufert of Chatham, is an avocational archaeologist, academically trained in the archaeological remains of the Native Americans of Cape Cod, who once worked as a field technician for the National Park Service at their Coast Guard Beach Site. “I worked around the Cape but my masters thesis ( California State University, East Bay) was creating a predictive archaeological map of Chatham. This involved a lot of walkover surveys in the Chatham landscape and researching prior knowledge of archaeological sites within the towns borders. I’ve never known anything like this in town. I knew they probably existed but until Ethan pointed at the rock I’d yet to see one outside of Eastham’s Fort Hill.”
The small boulder at the edge of Goose Pond in Chatham is cut with the hallmark deep grooves and smooth circles where stone tools would have been sharpened for hunting and fishing. It's similar to the larger sharpening stone at Fort Hill in Eastham, which was moved to the hill from the marsh below, where it also was once used by the local Nauset tribe as a sharpening stone. When Ethan patted the rock Seufert noticed a dark metallic seam running down it’s middle, which no doubt is the material that gives the rock it’s sharpening properties.
Seufert thinks the stone, that he now calls “Ethan’s Rock,” to be a potentially significant discovery for the town of Chatham. When the town was drafting it’s comprehensive plan in the early 1990’s he used that as the opportunity to get what he knew about the Native American history included into it. “Previously,” he says, “the town history begin with pilgrim William Nickerson and the native Monomoyicks were only mentioned in relation to his initial land purchase and to Samuel de Champlain in 1606. They were a footnote and were not treated as the true first settlers of Chatham, which they are. What I see here is one of the only places in town where you can see the evidence of their presence here, outside of the sensitive archaeological sites buried in the ground. It could be a great historical and tourist landmark here, that would not be destroyed by having it’s location known.”
Though Seufert is trained as an archaeologist, he has not practiced as an archaeologist for over ten years and has submitted the findings of his son to the state archaeologist at the Massachusetts Historical Commission. Since his son discovered the rock he has located a shell midden nearby, which is a layer of shell and debris that often accompanies Native American habitation over the last few thousand years. “There’s no way of telling how old the marks are on the rock, they’re probably 5,000 to 500 years old, but we can date it in the context of a nearby site. The Monomoyick summered on the coast in the warm season and wintered in and around the kettle hole ponds. We know that much. There is likely a habitation site near this rock, but any sites associated with this sharpening rock should be preserved intact or excavated by a professional, so we can’t know how long ago this boulder was used right now.”
Seufert says that local pothunting is a problem and that, though the site of this sharpening boulder should be made public and celebrated in the town records as a historical tourist spot, any in-ground sites should be honored as federally protected.
