Laying the Foundation, Ross Moffett and Cape Cod Archaeology

Beginning in October 1978, and continuing until June 1979, I spent twenty-two days at the R.S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology in Andover, Massachusetts, working on Ross Moffett's collections. I was doing this because the National Park Service (NPS), for who I was then the regional archeologist, was planning a park-wide archeological survey at Cape Cod National Seashore. It would be the first overall investigation of the archeological record of the park since Ross Moffett had provided a summary of his knowledge about sites on the outer Cape in 1962. Reviewing his field notes, maps, and profile drawings, I tried to delineate different site components when possible. The collections from Small's Swamp, Warren's Field, Pilgrim Spring, Freeman Paine, and Seth’s Swamp were particularly useful with quite a bit of contextual information about the site area, stratigraphy, and excavations available in Moffett's notebooks and field records.