Faculty lecture will explore archeological findings in northern Maine
McKillop Library will host another faculty lecture for its fall 2022 series, and this one will be with Dr. Heather Rockwell, professor in the Department of Cultural, Environmental and Global Studies. The lecture will be entitled “Archaeology at the Edge of the World: Investigating the First People of Maine,” and it will be held on Thursday, Nov. 10, at 4 p.m. on the first floor of the McKillop Library. To register, go here.
During this lecture, Dr. Rockwell will reveal preliminary details from field work in the NKP quarry complex that is located within the Munsungun Lake geologic formation of northern Maine. This site has quickly emerged as one of the most important Indigenous toolstone acquisition areas in the Northeast.
Intensively used quarry areas are rare in the region, and many of the locations that are known have been impacted by decades of formal and informal artifact collecting, logging, agriculture and other development. Field work conducted since 2016 has revealed that the use of this location extends well beyond traditional quarrying activities and includes stone tool workshops and habitation areas occupied as early as the Pleistocene.
During the summer of 2022, eight students from Salve Regina — including Alejandra Garcia-Silvia ’23, who was profiled recently on SALVEtoday — accompanied Dr. Rockwell to investigate one of these workshop locations called the PPE site. Accompanying as co-investigator was Dr. Nathaniel Kitchel, professor in the Department of Archeology at Dartmouth College.
This presentation by Dr. Rockwell will detail the preliminary results of this fieldwork and contextualize it within the broader understanding of indigenous prehistory.
Dr. Heather Rockwell earned her doctorate in anthropology from the University of Wyoming in 2014. She joined the Salve Regina faculty as an assistant professor in 2020. She teaches within the Noreen Stonor Drexel Cultural and Historic Preservation Program, as well as and the sociology and anthropology program within the department of Cultural, Environmental and Global Studies.
Dr. Rockwell’s specialization is on Paleoindigenous people of New England and the Canadian Maritimes and the initial colonization of North America during the Pleistocene. She currently has an active research program in Maine exploring its first indigenous inhabitants and secondary project assessing job hiring patterns of anthropologists into tenure track positions.
The lecture will be held Thursday, Nov. 10, at 4 p.m. on the first floor of the McKillop Library. To register, go here.
