"Archaeology at the Edge of the World: Investigating the First People of Maine" Join us with Dr. Rockwell, Professor of Anthropology, with the Department of Cultural, Environmental & Global Studies, as she reveals preliminary details from field work in the NKP quarry complex, located within the Munsungun Lake geologic formation of northern Maine. This site has quickly emerged as one of the most important Indigenous toolstone acquisition areas in the Northeast.  

Intensively used quarry areas are rare in the region and many of the locations that are known have been impacted by decades of formal and informal artifact collecting, logging, agriculture, and other development. Field work conducted since 2016 has revealed that the use of this location extends well beyond traditional quarrying activities and includes stone tool workshops and habitation areas occupied as early as the Pleistocene. During the summer of 2022, eight students from Salve Regina University accompanied Dr. Rockwell and co-investigator Dr. Nathaniel Kitchel of Dartmouth College to investigate one of these workshop locations called the PPE site. This presentation will detail the preliminary results of this fieldwork and contextualize it within our broader understanding of indigenous prehistory.

Heather M. Rockwell earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Wyoming in 2014. She joined the Salve faculty as an assistant professor in 2020. She teaches within both the Noreen Stonor Drexel Cultural and Historic Preservation Program and the Sociology/Anthropology Program within the department of Cultural, Environmental, and Global Studies. Her specialization is on Paleoindigenous people of New England and the Canadian Maritimes and the initial colonization of North America during the Pleistocene. She currently has an active research program in Maine exploring its first indigenous inhabitants and secondary project assessing job hiring patterns of anthropologists into tenure track positions.