By Jodi Hausen,Staff Writer

TURNER – Archaeologists last week found rare evidence of human activity 10,000 to 12,000 years ago behind a construction site in Turner.

They found that people left evidence of their existence dating back to about 8000 B.C., said Bob Bartone, assistant director for archaeology at the University of Maine at Farmington who supervised the dig.

Those early people either lived briefly in the area or roamed through it. Until recently, it was a campground off Route 219. The site is behind what will be the Bear Pond Village condominium project.

Living during the Paleoindian period, the people left behind stone tools and flakes. They’re believed to be the first human inhabitants in Maine after the Ice Age, he said.

“Anything before that, and they’d have to be under a glacier,” Bartone said Thursday at the site.

Bartone imagines the landscape at the time, now nestled between wetlands and Bear Pond, to be more open tundra, possibly with migratory herds of caribou roaming through it.

Arrowheads and tools

Judging by the tools and flakes of “chert,” a flintlike stone, they found, he traces the people to Munsungan Lake north of Baxter State Park, he said. That type of stone is not natural to the Turner area. Early inhabitants were probably engaged in trade or brought the stones with them, he explained. They appear to be arrowheads and tools for scraping and cutting.

These types of tools are hallmarks of this period. Sites of this nature are fairly rare, he said. There are only a handful of them in the state.

So far, the dig, which is only about 2 feet deep, has not yielded an ancient hearth or a food-storage site. Such a find could provide information about the early people’s use of vegetative matter for food, clothing and medicines, he said. Carbon from hearths could also be used to more accurately date the site.

The dig, the university’s annual tribute to Maine Archaeology Month, provides opportunities for students and other volunteers to participate in a dig. Volunteers who were sifting and inspecting piles of dirt from nearby pits Thursday said they’d always wanted to check out a dig.

“It’s pretty neat to find something that old,” said Monique Lepine of Berlin, N.H.

An amateur’s goal

Recently retired from nearly 30 years with the Forest Service, Kenny Wing of Eustis said one reason he left his job was to pursue archaeology.

“I’ve collected all my life as an amateur archaeologist,” he said. A board member with the Maine Archaeology Society, he said he had been “talked out of” going into the field in high school.

“I’ve always been interested in how they draw the conclusions they do,” Maggie Gill-Austern, a Farmington volunteer, said. “It’s more common-sensical than you can understand from reading about it,” she added.

Bartone said staff and volunteers will likely return to the site next October. For more information on archaeological events, visit the society’s Web site at www.mainearchsociety.org.