The Indian Neck Ossuary

In September, 1979, National Park Service archaeologists conducting an archaeolgoical survey of Cape Cod National Seashore were called to a site on Indian Neck, a peninsula in Wellfleet Harbor on outer Cape Cod. A backhoe operator digging a hole for a cottage's septic tank had unearthed human bones. Based on the condition of the exposed bones, the archaeologists determined that the burial was prehistoric. The cottage owners allowed the NPS archaeological team to excavate the remaining undistrubed portion of the burial and gave them a week to complete the excavation. After two days of careful fieldwork an unexpected but intriguing burial feature had been exposed. The backhoe had cut through a collection of bones containing the remains of at least 56 people, men, women and children, interred together about 1,000 years ago in a communal burial. It is the best-documented example
of an ossuary (the technical term for such a deposit of bones) in New England, and one of the best-documented outside northwestern New York State, adjacent parts of Ontario and the Chesapeake Bay region where this burial type is known from late prehistoirc and early historic times. It also is the strongest evidence to date bearing on what is still an open question about the prehistory of coastal
New England: how settled were the native inhabitants in the centuries before Europeans arrived? We
believe the ossuary, combined with other archaeological data and the testimony of the first Europeans to explore the region, tips the balance of evidence away from scenarios in which the coast saw no more than occasional visits or seasonal camps and toward a picture of permanent coastal habitation.