Maine History Online

As the climate changed again, so too did the flora, fauna, animals and the types of tools people made and used. After about 3,700 years ago, the tool became broad-blade spear points. But climate changes also caused the population to move farther away and little archaeological record exists from about 3,500 to 2,700 years ago.

Then, the Early Woodland Period brought rapid cultural changes with the appearance of agriculture, ceramics, and birch-bark canoes, an expansion of trade networks, and more intense exploitation of marine and coastal resources.

All this gave rise to more permanent settlements on the coast, the islands, and along the lower river stems. The most visible evidence of some of these changes are the shell middens, trash heaps of shells, most notable on the Damariscotta Peninsula.

The shells preserved other organic refuse, leaving evidence of a varied cuisine made up of nuts and berries, waterfowl, deer, moose, bear, beaver, muskrat, porcupine, dog, wolf, fox, otter, marten, fisher, skunk, raccoon, bobcat, alewives, finned fish, shellfish, sturgeon, seal, porpoise, an extinct species of sea mink, and assorted other gleanings from this diverse Maine landscape.

People also made fired-clay ceramics that replaced wood, bark, or woven bowls in Maine around 2,700 years ago, a change that meant significant improvements in food processing and diet and offered better storage possibilities, making villages more permanent.

Development of the bark canoe extended the hunter's reach into the game-rich upper tributaries and expanded networks of trade and exchange. The Micmac of eastern Maine and New Brunswick, the most formidable mariners of the period, constructed huge canoes some 28 feet long with hogged gunwales amidship to keep them rigid in the ocean swells.

In addition to shellfish exploitation, ceramics, and canoes, Woodland Indians developed new projectile points with deep corner and side notches and a broad array of cutting, scraping, grinding, and hammering tools.

It was a Woodland people known as the Wabanaki who encountered the Europeans when they arrived on the Maine coast at the beginning of the 16th century. Wabanaki – the People of the Dawn – were part of an Algonquian confederation stretching from New England west to the Great Lakes.

Whether the Wabanaki developed from the original migrants to Maine or from the more recent Susquehanna Tradition is difficult to say, but there are significant cultural threads running through these innumerable changes in culture, climate, and environment.

As various societies grew, flourished, and faded, they passed this cultural legacy down. The arrival of Europeans brought one more change, albeit large, in a long series of alterations for the indigenous peoples of Maine.

Wabanaki oral traditions, especially the stories of Gluskabe, explain the origins of the native population and the transition from the huge animals – like the giant beaver in the era of wooly mammoths – to the creatures now known.

The stories explain the relationships of the native peoples to the world around them as well as offering moral lessons. These oral traditions do much to enhance the prehistoric record when written communications did not exist and when artifacts and other archaeological activities tend to be the major source of information.

Geographically, the Eastern Abenaki fell into two broad categories: those living in the oak-chestnut-hickory region from southern New England to the Saco River, and the northern and inland Indians occupying the coniferous forest.

Indians to the south of Maine began cultivating corn, beans, and squash around 3,000 years ago. Maize came to Maine about 1,000 years ago and supplied about 65 percent of the Woodland Indians' caloric needs. Given the risks of crop failure in colder climates, those east of the Saco chose to devote their energies to hunting and gathering rather than farming.

In southern Maine this new food source, coupled with a rich coastal environment, triggered a pronounced population increase that put pressure on the soil, beaver colonies, and clam beds.

The Abenaki also had many other resources at hand. Recent research indicates a complex seasonal movement radiating out from year-round village sites near the coast. At the coast, nearby estuaries provided fish, shellfish, and waterfowl, and islands promised a feast of shellfish, lobsters, and weir-trapped fish.

This dense array of resources probably kept people near the coast most of the year. But the Maine environment provided no single resource that would sustain a village – coastal or upland – through all four seasons, so like their predecessors, the Abenaki moved in seasonal rounds seeking subsistence in a constantly changing landscape.

The Abenaki summer was a time of maximum mobility, as bands or families dispersed and regrouped for hunting, freshwater and ocean fishing, foraging, and tending crops. During fall women remained in the village smoking lobster for storage and preparing berries by pounding, crushing, boiling, and drying them.

The fall passenger pigeon migration again filled the larder, as did the fall migrations of waterfowl and eels and the harvest of butternuts, chestnuts, and acorns. During late fall men hunted black bear, beaver, deer, moose, and squirrel, and in winter, deer and beaver.

In May, those in southern Maine planted maize, beans, and squash, then moved upriver to catch anadromous fish, to boil syrup in the maple and birch groves, and to catch passenger pigeons on their spring northward migrations.

Father Pierre Biard, a missionary on Mt. Desert Island in 1613-1614, recalled that in mid-winter Indians in the Penobscot Bay hunted beaver, otter, moose, bear, and caribou. If the hunt was successful, they lived "in great abundance as princes and kings;" if not, they were "greatly to be pitied, and often die of starvation."

In mid-March, anadromous fish made their way up the rivers to spawn, and food was once again abundant; in May they moved to the coast to gather shellfish and catch cod, and in September they withdrew to the "little rivers" where eels spawned. October and November saw a second hunt for moose and beaver. In other locations, there are some variations in the seasonal rotations, available resources, and possibly individual taste.

In agricultural villages, men hunted, trapped, cleared and burned the woods, and took care of diplomatic and military excursions. Women fished and foraged for food items, herbs, and medicinals. They gathered firewood, cooked, processed food, cared for the children, and produced domestic items like clothing, leather, woven mats, baskets, and shelters.

Women also did most of the agricultural work, using shells or horseshoe crab carapaces for trowels and deer horns for hoes. Their squash plants carpeted the field below the maize stocks, discouraging weeds and protecting the soils from erosion, while beans climbed the stocks and helped return nitrogen to the soils.

Settlement patterns, subsistence strategies, and Indian technologies were in great flux in the centuries prior to European arrival. Traditionally, river systems defined the territorial claims of each tribe, but in the horticultural sections of New England this watershed system was breaking down, due to demographic pressures and a more sedentary social organization based on agriculture.

Indians were crossing watersheds as much as traveling up them. When the Europeans arrived in Maine in the early 1500s, they triggered vast changes in Indian settlement patterns, subsistence, and technology.

Maine's Abenaki entered a new and in many ways more tragic era, but their adaptive strategies served them well, as they continue to do today.