It’s Important—

Holding The Past In The Palm Of His Hand

By Kendra Bobowick

Who: Newtown’s town historian and author Daniel Cruson.

What is important to him: Artifacts that reveal glimpses of the town’s history, and the stories that hand-chiseled weapons unravel about who has passed through Newtown’s valleys and knolls.

He walked through the office and placed a quartz, hand-shaped “projectile point” onto the desk. “This is the oldest artifact in Newtown,” said Town Historian Daniel Cruson.

Is it? The bifurcated, or hand-chipped and tapered triangular point with notched edges where it would have been wrapped and secured to a spear is roughly 8,000 years old. The point is similar to other New England artifacts dated to the same period.

“Man has been here a long time,” he said. Staring at the white, worn implement on the table, Mr Cruson reached 8,000 years into the past and lifted the artifact to look at its design. “The wonderful part, aside from me being the first person to touch this since [a hunter] dropped it, is that the town is 300 years old; that’s just a hiccup of time since man has been here.”

In stark comparison, he said, “That’s 4,000 years before the pyramids in Egypt.”

Turning the spear tip in his fingers, he noted the worth of a simple gesture: lifting the quartz from the ground in the 1970s as he walked a plowed field along Flat Swamp Road. “This connects me to him, connects me to the man who walked and hunted here.”

Searching his mind for the man’s image, Mr Cruson admitted, “It’s so far in the past, it’s misty.” The man would have appeared modern, he confirmed. He would have dressed in skins, but appeared completely modern. Mr Cruson imagines he would have spoken an early dialect “spoken here historically.”

The neighborhood where the artifact surfaced was once farmland that sits on a knoll surrounded by swampy areas down the hill. The lower lands were likely ponds in the past. The geography could easily have served hunter-gatherers as a corridor or pass through the region. Nearby water and a higher elevation were likely also appealing, Mr Cruson explained. Guessing, he said, “This probably were winter camps.”

The spear tip’s historic footnote is clear to Mr Cruson. “Apparently the people were hunter-gatherers, before bow and arrow. You have to recognize that these archaic sites are rare in Connecticut.”

New housing developments, roads, strip malls, and modern living now cover much of the ground’s hidden secrets to past inhabitants, he noted. The region and coast’s water levels also have changed. What was once “locked up in glaciers” had melted and spread, burying below sea level what may be other clues to who traveled through the area in times past.

He then pulled from his pocket what appeared to be an ordinary, smoothed oval stone. Upon closer view, however, its surface bore a worn path down the center — its edges, too, were decorated with what Mr Cruson surmises are a tally of kills. Small notches lined the stone’s edge. Did they indicate fallen elk, deer, or bear? Possibly, he said. Naming the stone, he said it is a spear-thrower’s weight, or atlatl. The stone added momentum to a projectile, and imparted power to a spear. The artifact, found on the same knoll along Flat Swamp Road, is approximately 4,000 years old.

The two archaeological clues tell him something. “This expresses continuity of man in Newtown.” Describing the timeline, he said, “These people are separated by 4,000 years when they dropped something.” The hunter with the shaped spear point is as far away from the atlatl as the stone user is from us, he said. The artifacts are continuity to the past, or “the thread that ties” past to present, Mr Cruson said. He thanks the farm owner who sold the property, and the developer who built home there for the opportunity to “hunt” the site for finds before homeowners moved in.

He hopes new zoning regulations that allow for archaeological research will help “document at the very least” heritage that will otherwise be covered with lawns, new homes, and driveways.

What is now neighborhoods where children stand near the mailbox and wait for the bus, or where neighbor’s dogs rush to the stonewall and bark at passersby was once a semipermanent village. Several small and scattered families may have lived off Newtown’s land, Mr Cruson said. “It’s an assumption, but Newtown was probably an interior winter campsite where nuclear families came together in winter and gathered in larger groups with kinsmen.”

The area could have also “acted as a highway or footpaths for local Indians,” he said.

(The Bee series It’s Important includes a brief interview and video revealing — one person, one idea at a time — what is important to you. Be a part of It’s Important. Contact Kendra at 203-426-3141 or reach her at Kendra@thebee.com. Go to NewtownBee.com to see It’s Important.) See the related video at NewtownBee.com.