By DAN TUOHY
Like gardeners painstakingly at work, the diggers hunch and scrape away layers of soil. Scoop dirt. Screen. Examine. Repeat.
Centimeters at a time, they are bringing the colonial past to life on Durham Point, the site of the famous 1694 Oyster River massacre.
The Oyster River Environs Archaeology Project, now in its fourth year, has recovered more than 5,000 artifacts. Project Director Craig J. Brown continued to unearth history this summer with the help of volunteers enrolled in field trips.
"This is as close to time travel as you can get," Brown said as he inspected a recent excavation.
Brown aims to shed light on the interactions between the Native Americans and the English settlers at Durham Point, once known as Oyster River Plantation.
Volunteer archaeologist Sally Strazdins of North Hampton scoops soil during a recent excavation for the Oyster River Environs Archaeology Project on Durham Point.
The frontiersmen suffered many attacks, not just the 1694 raid that resulted in the brutal slaying or capture of about 100 people. The land was settled in the 1630s, not long after the first settlements on Dover Point and Odiorne Point in Rye.
The Field-Bickford garrison now under excavation was a homestead, tavern and ferry center for Darby Field, the first European to summit Mount Washington, and later the Bickford family.
In the massacre, unsuspecting settlers were killed amid the confusion, in what Brown believes was an orchestrated attack. Fast-acting men and women escaped. Others holed up in their garrisons -- fortified homes of the day -- and fired at the raiders. Thomas Bickford was one of them.
According to Brown, after Bickford saw to it that his family was safely across the river, he arranged himself in his garrison to give the attackers the sense he was one of several men inside. He shouted orders using different voices. He donned different coats. He hustled to and from parts of the garrison as a show of manpower. The gambit worked, and Bickford and his garrison survived.
Before the Native American warriors retreated, ultimately taking some of their hostages north to Quebec, they burned half the settlement to the ground.
"There are a lot of unanswered questions," Brown said. "We don't know the economics of the site. We don't know the footprint of the site. We don't know what the house looked like."
But the archaeological team is slowly piecing it all together.
Field trip volunteers learn standard archaeological field excavation techniques. When they are digging, which is usually about four weeks over two months in the summer, there are a dozen or more people on site.
This summer, the crew brought in ground-penetrating radar, thanks to Peter Sablock, chairman of Geological Sciences at Salem State College in Massachusetts, which helped map out the building foundation. Brown and company now believe the Bickford garrison was much bigger than they believed, or that there was a second building attached to it at some point.
The Langley family, which lets the archaeologists work on its land and embraced a conservation easement to protect it, runs the Little Bay Buffalo Company. As the diggers toil away, fending off pesky no-see-ums and greenhead flies, the occasional buffalo is known to lumber not far away and stare at them.
For the most part, the volunteers train their eyes on the dirt.
Ryan Rybka, a high school junior from North Yarmouth, Maine, recently discovered some pottery pieces and nails. "This is a lot of fun," he said, "and it's challenging."
Anthony Adamsky, a college student from Pelham, was inspired after participating in a dig last year in Maine. Looking up from a carefully carved pit, he joked, "I like digging in the dirt."
Sally Strazdins, a volunteer from North Hampton, came across bits of glass and some nails as she carefully scraped away.
"This is more finding out what is not there more than what is there," she said. "We all enjoy it. The history you're unearthing after 300 years is just waiting to be found."
Brown was working in the accounting field in the mid-1990s when he decided to jump ship and pursue his passion for history. He graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 2007 with a degree in anthropology. He is now at University of Massachusetts-Boston, with an eye on a master's thesis: Likely something to do with the Oyster River Plantation.
The field work is being conducted under the auspices of the New Hampshire State Conservation and Rescue Archaeology Program, in cooperation with the cultural resources management firm of Crane and Morrison of Freeport, Maine.
Brown coordinates the excavation with Richard Boisvert, the New Hampshire state archaeologist. Boisvert described the site's significance in a 2007 newsletter of the New Hampshire Archeological Society: "The ultimate goal is to bring to light an immensely important and complex, though poorly understood, era of New Hampshire's early history."
The diggers have come up with a few French-made musket balls and numerous gun flints, the latter giving weight to Brown's belief the settlers were a significant manufacturer of the flints. The excavation uncovered the remains of a nearly complete hand-painted blue on white pearl-ware teapot, circa 1780-1820, according to Brown.
One of the finds is a soapstone pipe stem carved by a Native American sometime in the mid- to late- 17th century. What piques Brown's interest is that the pipe is fashioned after the European pipe of the day.
"It goes to show," he said, "that the contact between the early Americans and the Native Americans wasn't always hostile."
