There is so much we will never know about the life of the Great Meadows. The birds and animals that currently frequent there remain only partially knowable to us. How much more difficult it is, then, to decipher the lives of the people who preceded us in the Great Meadows by thousands of years, especially since they left behind no written record of their activities.
Happily, they did leave us some of the tools they used in their everyday lives. In fact, the Great Meadows area has yielded the richest concentration of artifacts of any Concord site. This physical evidence, considered in the light of the traditions and oral history of living Native Americans, enables archeologists to form a picture of human life in the prehistoric era.
Men and women first arrived in the Great Meadows 13,000 to 11,000 years ago, after the mantle of ice that had covered New England for 60,000 years finally receded. The melting glacier deposited soil, the birds and wind brought seeds, and eventually shrubs and other herbaceous plants took root. Over time, the animals began to arrive, each kind in search of the plants or creatures below it in the food chain. And so it was that one day a new animal, Homo sapiens, appeared on the landscape, also in quest of food.
As Dena F. Dincauze points out in From Musketaquid to Concord, the very fact that these pioneers (known as Paleoindians to archeologists) reached the Northeast was itself remarkable. Traveling without benefit of compass, map, or technical gear, the Paleoindians crossed the continent from the south or the west. They forded rushing rivers, circumvented glacial lakes and wetlands, and threaded their way through forbidding, ice-clad mountains.
We cannot know what inspired their migration, what they strove to escape or achieve, but we can be sure that getting here at all required courage and ingenuity. Once they arrived, further challenges awaited them. The glacier had wrought a new world never before inhabited by humans. These earliest people had to invent a way of life that would sustain them in this untried environment.
Probably no more than a few hundred people lived in the Northeast during the period called the Pleistocene (13,000-11,000 years ago) by archeologists. Most lived on the continental shelf exposed because the north polar ice-cap had absorbed much of the planet's water. The marshes and estuaries of the continental shelf yielded a bountiful food supply. Nonetheless, the Paleoindians would regularly make inland forays to hunt caribou and other large mammals.
We know that Paleoindians came to the Great Meadows and camped on the ridge running along its south and eastern edge because they left behind fluted spear points characteristic of the Pleistocene era. According to Esther K. Braun and David P. Braun writing in The First People of the Northeast, this type of leaf-shaped spear point with a flaked groove running up the middle "is so distinctive that any time an archeologist finds one someplace, he or she knows that a Paleoindian passed by there long ago."
A steep drop from the ridge to the low-lying marshland of the Great Meadows is a good example of what geologists call "the ice contact face," the place where the glacier stopped. The high ground overlooking the marshes may have appealed to the Paleoindians as a campsite because it offered a dry stopping place in a wet terrain.
The site had the added advantage of lying at the intersection of two ecological niches -- the plains that extended from the ridge and the marshlands below it -- and being within easy reach of a third, the river. Three such niches could mean triple the food-gathering potential. Even so, the Great Meadows of the Pleistocene was hardly a land of plenty. Its flora included ground covers such as groundnuts and other tuberous root plants, and, on the upland, berry-producing shrubs and pine trees. It was home to waterfowl and small mammals, such as rabbits. Occasionally, larger game, such as elk, caribou and moose browsed on the plains behind the ridge.
The Paleoindian culture lasted for roughly two millennia. But gradually the environment changed, and the people changed with it. A warming climate made it possible for southern vegetation to move into the Northeast, species by species. The conifers -- spruce, then pine and hemlock -- arrived in the early Pleistocene. As the climate warmed still more, oaks and other broad-leafed trees found their way into the region, and with them, the animal and plant life that would thrive in such a habitat.
Art Credits: Backgrounds by Word of Mouth Web Design; Great Meadows photo by...oops...we aren't sure who took this photo; other images courtesy of clipart.com.
