From left, Washington College professor Julie Markin, Washington College intern Kat Esposito and Penn State intern Kerrick Deardorff sort through artifacts on a screen as Washington College intern Amy Cannon approaches the site of the dig. Photo by Jeremy Cox/Chesapeake Bay Journal.
By Jeremy Cox
Chesapeake Bay Journal
From an archaeologist’s point of view, Maryland’s Eastern Shore holds many secrets.
Artifacts could throw light on how Native people lived, but few have been unearthed because investigators have been unable to access them. Much of the land, mainly grain farms and timber tracts, is privately owned.
A dig can go ahead if a certain parcel is targeted for development. But such projects are few and far between in the rural region.
Julie Markin has been working for years to literally “dig up” new details about how Indigenous people lived on the Eastern Shore. The Washington College anthropologist is excited about the potential for her latest archaeological work to rewrite history.
Now in its third year of fieldwork, the dig, she said, is revealing new clues about the importance of local waterways in early human cultures in the under-documented region.
The site is perched slightly north of Denton, a Colonial era trading post in Caroline County along the Choptank River, the largest Chesapeake Bay tributary on the Eastern Shore. The investigators have converged on a spit of forested land, interspersed with rural homes, near the river’s intersection with a slow-moving creek.
Washington College professor Julie Markin stands near the upper Choptank River dig, where she has been searching for clues about how Indigenous people lived on the Eastern Shore. Photo by Jeremy Cox/Chesapeake Bay Journal.
It wasn’t just Europeans who leveraged the region’s waterways to traffic in goods and ideas with distant lands, Markin said. Early findings from the Washington College led dig add to evidence showing that’s been the case for thousands of years.
She and her team have uncovered a bevy of pottery fragments, or “sherds” in the discipline’s parlance. Much of the earthenware appears to have been crafted in styles typical of those usually found in faraway places, including land that is now part of Pennsylvania, Maryland’s Western Shore and Virginia’s Bay area.
Markin can’t say for sure what that means. But she said it likely suggests that the region’s people, called the Choptank tribe, either traded for the pottery or produced it themselves, having mingled enough with other cultures to adopt at least some of their traditions.
Either way, the discovery hints that the hook of land lying between the Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic Ocean was no backwater, she said.
“We’re between two resource areas. Why wouldn’t it be a central place?” Markin asked. “What’s exciting about the site [where we are working] is it’s not isolated the way we think of the Eastern Shore. They’re in a really great location for mixing with groups or the group’s ideas or their material culture.”
The entities partnering on the Choptank dig — Washington College, the Archeological Society of Maryland and the Maryland Historical Trust — have taken an unconventional strategy: forging agreements with adjoining private landowners to access a broad swath of individual properties.
The site might have gone undiscovered if not for a neighbor’s curiosity. During the summer of 2022, Markin and her colleagues were excavating the site of a tavern used by European settlers in the 1700s when they were approached by the owners of a nearby parcel.
The residents reported that they frequently ran across projectile points, bits of pottery and other items of pre-Contact vintage around their property. Sometimes, the artifacts could be found just lying on the ground, they said.
Washington College professor Julie Markin displays, from left, a piece of ceramic pottery, a jasper flake and a chert flake uncovered during a dig near the Choptank River. Photo by Jeremy Cox/Chesapeake Bay Journal.
Markin accepted their invitation to investigate and began by scooping out dozens of shovel test pits — holes measuring about a foot across and 2 feet deep. Archaeologists excavate the pits in a grid pattern at the start of a project to determine a site’s geographic scope and which locations might warrant more rigorous investigation.
The sherds found during five weeks in the summer of 2022 uncovered 124 pieces of pottery. Importantly, there didn’t appear to be any gaps in the artifacts as the archaeologists dug through the layers. That suggests that the Choptanks probably used the site continuously, Markin said.
Judging by the depths from which the objects originated, the site was likely used for more than 2,500 years, from 1000 B.C.E. to about 1600 C.E., Markin believes.
The few previous archaeological digs that have been conducted in the region have documented a dozen sites in an 11-mile stretch along the upper Choptank between the modern-day towns of Denton and Goldsboro. They point to the waterway serving as a focal point for civilization prior to European contact. The Denton site adds to that scholarship, Markin said.
Last September, Markin and Katherine “Kat” Esposito, a former student now serving as Markin’s intern, published a paper about their initial findings in the journal Maryland Archeology. Their title referred to it as a “curious case.”
Why so curious? A couple reasons.
Across the Chesapeake region, Indigenous societies were initially nomadic, following food resources according to seasonal availability. Over time, they shifted into permanent settlements.
Despite its continuous use, the Denton site has yielded no notable human-built features, such as dwellings. That could point to it being more of a trading hub than a settled community, Markin said.
Another surprising finding involves something they haven’t actually found: evidence of oysters. The bivalves were a dietary staple of most Native communities, previous investigations have shown. The brackish portion of the Choptank reaches within 2 miles of the Denton site, so its inhabitants wouldn’t have needed to travel far to gather some.
Kat Esposito looks on as Kerrick Deardorff tosses a shovelful of sand onto a grate to be sifted for archaeological clues about how Native people lived along the Choptank River. Photo by Jeremy Cox/Chesapeake Bay Journal.
Why didn’t they? Markin theorizes that the people may have had conflicts with neighboring groups who barred them from accessing that portion of the river — or they simply just didn’t like oysters.
Attempts to reconstruct what life was like on the Shore typically have fallen back on what is known about people on Maryland’s Western Shore and around Delaware Bay. It’s not just that the archaeological evidence is thin on the Shore, Markin said. It’s also due to a dearth of contemporaneous accounts from European colonists.
“We have a little bit of knowledge from historical documents,” Markin said. “But because settlement came later than on the Western Shore, it wasn’t fleshed out.”
“Very little of our history was documented,” said Chief Donna Abbott of the Nause-Waiwash Band of Indians, a tribe based in neighboring Dorchester County whose ancestors include the Choptank people. “It was word-of-mouth. Also, because we were trying to avoid execution, we weren’t documented as Indian on census records.”
Abbott said she is grateful for Markin’s work. But she would like her people to be included more in the process.
Markin said she shares that goal, in part because the interpretation of artifacts often relies heavily on what she calls the “cultural knowledge” of descendants. She said she tried contacting the tribe at the start of the project, but the two sides failed to connect. (After a Bay Journal reporter relayed Abbott’s interest in partnering, Markin said she would “look forward” to bringing the tribe into the fold and work to do so.)
Abbott said she also wants to make sure that the artifacts removed from the site are handled respectfully after they have been studied, either displayed in a museum or reburied where they were found.
This piece of pottery was likely created by a member or members of the Choptank tribe. Photo by Jeremy Cox/Chesapeake Bay Journal.
Markin said she supports developing such an exhibit in consultation with local Native groups. Materials that don’t become part of an exhibit would be housed with the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Lab, ensuring they are accessible for research and educational purposes, she said.
But she added that “this arrangement is not set in stone and is something to talk about with descendant groups.”
Earlier this year, the Maryland Historical Trust awarded $40,000 to the project. That funding enabled Markin to hire six interns as field crew workers, lab assistants and research assistants.
Dodging poison ivy and lone star ticks, the group has continued digging more test pits this summer. Markin and her team still haven’t found the site’s boundary, despite venturing hundreds of yards eastward from their starting point near the Choptank’s shoreline. Just about every shovelful has yielded a new discovery.
“I got pottery,” called out Amy Cannon, a Washington College intern, just minutes into digging the first test pit of the day on a steamy summer morning. Between her thumb and index finger, she clasped a tiny, earth-colored sherd.
“It’s a baby piece,” replied Xan Wojie, another Washington intern.
Even so, the artifact went into a zippered plastic bag, where it would await further inspection back at the lab, along with an avalanche of similar objects collected at the site.