PAL

PAL completed archaeological data recovery programs for five pre-contact Native American sites in North Reading, Massachusetts, in advance of a proposed project that included building a mixed business/residential development on an 87-acre parcel within the former John T. Berry Rehabilitation Center property. 

Process

• The five locations investigated contained a variety of cultural deposits and depositional integrity indicating a high potential for the sites to contain new classes of data and making them eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places.
• The investigations yielded more than 14,000 Native American pre-contact chipped-stone tools, ground-stone tools and chipping debris, and more than 50 cultural features (fire pits, storage and/or trash pits, and rock clusters).

Results

Results indicated that the J.T. Berry Site was intensively and repeatedly used by Middle and Late Archaic populations (approximately 8,000 to 3,000 years ago) for a variety of domestic and subsistence-related activities, including food procurement/processing and storage/disposal, and stone toolmaking.

The archaeological data was used to explain the depositional history of the sites and to examine patterns of pre-contact settlement and subsistence at regional and sub-regional levels.