History at Our Feet

Don Doliber told the some 100 people crowded into the speakers' room at Sunday that a wealth of history is right at their feet.

“If we spent more time looking down we’d find out more about Marblehead,” he said.

The Marblehead resident and former Masconomet High School history teacher offered a closer look at some of our town's earliest inhabitants.

Back in the early 1950's, Swampscott resident Bill Eldridge and others uncovered an important archaeological find in nearby Ipswich - a dig site which came to be known as the "Bull Brook" site.

They uncovered spearpoints and other objects used by Native Americans who hunted large prey including mastodon and giant beaver some 11,000 years ago.

Later, during the Woodland Period,  Native Americans would spend spring and summer in what later became the North Shore.

Where they spent their time fishing and hunted small game, he said. 

Local Native Americans loved seafood and left walls of shells in the ground by what is now West Shore Drive - shells used by thrifty Yankees to fertilize crops.

Local Native American settlements included those at , Chapel Hill, Beacon Hill, and Waterside and Harbor View Cemeteries.

There were settlements on land now home to and a native fort on land occupied by the Tower School.

Artifacts were uncovered in 1984 during digging a , Doliber said.

The last Indian settlement in Marblehead dates to about 1720, he said.

Doliber wound down the session by quizzing the audience on an artifact he had found, a stone object used thousands of years ago to grind corn.

People can still find rocks in town with bowl-like surfaces where native people would grind maize.

The Friends of the hosted Sunday’s presentation.

Friends President Toni Matsu volunteered during the quiz portion, offering guesses at what a pestle-like object could have been used thousands of years ago.

She inferred thoughts about the people who used the object.

It and others like it have been and will be found in Marblehead, Doliber said.

His suggestion? “Spend more time looking down.”