Notes on the Small's Swamp Shell Heap, Turo, Massachusetts, Moffett 1959

Small's Swamp, which provides the setting for the Indian shell heap here concerned, lies at the
bottom of a kettle hole in the High Head, or Pilgrim Heights, section of Truro. Small's Swamp Indian site, which is within the limits of the newly constituted Pilgrim Spring State Park, stretches for upwards of 325 feet along the northwestern border of the swamp, the original western limit of the site being perhaps obscured by grading in the area of the house site. (Fig. 1, No.5). Throughout much of its length the site is backed on its northerly side by a steep slope, but near its west end, where the site is crossed by an old farm road, the rise from swamp level is only moderate, owing to the presence here of an ancient glacial drainage course leading from the kettle hole northward into the present Salt Meadow. It is in this westerly quarter that the known shell heap materials have their greatest thickness, and also their greatest width, since they here extend back from the edge of the swamp for about 50 feet.