Looters strike Penobscot Bay archaeology site.

A long ignored thickly forested ravine on the west side of Penobscot Bay that may have hosted native American encampments stretching well before colonial times has been partly looted by person or persons unknown. The once slumping edge of the forested ravine, where old clamshells and other artifacts peeped out from the accumulated soils has been dug into and pulled down. clamshells and broken pottery and glass lie scattered. The looters seek only unbroken things that they can move quickly at a fleamarket or on EBAY

Across the western bay, the current owners of the Turner Farm on the North Haven side of the Fox Island Thoroughfare continue allowing the excavation of the remains of coastal native american communities that occupied the turner farm site for more than 8,000 years. Recent findings from the archeologists is of alternating eras during that time when nearshore or offshore fish species were their staple food. As the community prospered, near island fishes were fished out; they then moved to offshore fishing for swordfish, tuna and other large oceanic species that spend their lives near or on the surface. Once, however the nearshore species recovered by being left unfished for a lengthy period of time, the native american community would shift back to nearshore and inshore species.

This determined by painstaking digging of the trash middens where these peoples left their broken stone, clay and bone tools, and their fish, fowl & mammal bone, and shell garbage, shells down the centuries. With eight millenia worth of middens to excavate at the Turner Farm site, paleoecologists can learn