Archaeological Revelations On Magunco Hill
What the Ground Kept: The 1997 Dig
When archaeologists from the University of Massachusetts Boston's Fiske Center went up that same hill in 1997, they found no stockade. What they found, on the western wall of a small stone foundation roughly twelve feet by nine, was a rounded, crescent-shaped footing, the kind of shape that, glimpsed through the pines from a distance, might have been read as a bastion or a small defensive tower. They also found two musket balls in the ground nearby, both of them cut in half, a common wartime practice meant to make a shot do more damage on impact. Whatever happened on that hill in 1678, it left more than paperwork behind.
Decades of Unrecorded Persistence
More than three hundred years later, archaeologists returned to Magunco Hill and dug, and what they found confirmed something no English chronicler had bothered to record. The destruction of the war had not ended the human story on that hill. People came back, and by the evidence in the ground, they stayed for decades afterward. Pottery, tools, and the ordinary debris of households that kept their fires burning turned up in quantities suggesting the site remained in use into the middle of the eighteenth century, long after Magunkaquog had ceased to exist as a recognized praying town in any formal sense.
The dig turned up something from before the war as well, something the colonial pen had never thought worth writing down.
Sacred Quartz Beneath the Meeting House
The surface was not the whole of it. Outside the meeting house foundation, the archaeologists of 1997 found a large hearth containing animal bone, charcoal, and quartz cobbles that appeared to have been heated on purpose to split them and extract the clear crystal inside. Sixteen such crystals turned up in the immediate area, three of them, in the excavators' own judgment, probably placed deliberately in the corners of the structure when it was built, a practice since documented at an eighteenth-century Mohegan site in Connecticut as well. In a settlement where converts were pressed to give up their old ceremonies, someone at Magunkaquog had gone on quietly working quartz in a manner archaeologists now connect to religious practices among the region's Native peoples reaching back thousands of years, and had done it within a stone's throw of a Christian meeting house.
English Vessels, Nipmuc Ways
The pottery told a related story. Thousands of ceramic fragments came out of the ground, most of it English-style red earthenware of the kind a praying Indian household was expected to own, including a milk pan of a type made in North Devon and dated by its style to sometime between 1625 and 1660, the earliest English object found on the site. Many of the cooking vessels showed heavy charring on the outside, the mark left by a pot set directly into hot coals rather than hung properly over a fire in the English manner, a detail the excavators read as an English vessel put to use in something closer to the Nipmuc way. It is a small detail, and it says a good deal: the outward form had changed, English dishes, English-style houses, English trades, while some of the substance underneath had not.
Complex Loyalties: Pomhaman's Choice
That was the community the war scattered to Deer Island, and that was the same community, or what remained of it, that came back up the hill afterward and rebuilt in the wake of the Mohawk raid. Local historical research into the site, drawing on colonial-era records, indicates that Pomhaman himself did not remain simply a victim of the war. At some point during the fighting he joined the forces of Metacom, the very conflict that would in time cost his own people so dearly. The people of Magunkaquog, like the wider Nipmuc world around them, were not of one mind about where their future safety lay.