MYSTIC, Conn. — Artifacts of a battle between an American Indian tribe and English settlers, a confrontation that helped shape early American history, have sat for years below manicured lawns and children’s swing sets in a Connecticut neighborhood.
A project to map the battlefields of the Pequot War is bringing those musket balls, gunflints and arrowheads into the sunlight for the first time in centuries. It’s also giving researchers insight into the combatants and the land on which they fought, particularly the Mystic hilltop where at least 400 Pequot Indians died in a 1637 massacre by settlers.
Historians say the attack was a turning point in English warfare with native tribes. It nearly wiped out the powerful Pequots and showed other tribes that the colonists wouldn’t hesitate to use methods that some consider genocide.
The battle site was farmland for years before being developed in the mid-20th century into a residential neighborhood of tidy Capes, Colonials and ranch homes. A “Tree of Peace” is planted at a hilltop traffic circle that marks the center of an old Pequot fort.
“We never thought much about it when we moved here, though we’d get calls once in a while from researchers,” said Doris Oliver, who has lived on Pequot Avenue on the northern part of the battle zone with her husband, Ed, since the 1940s.
This summer, teams of researchers are scouring the Olivers’ yard with metal detectors, notebooks, small shovels and other archaeological tools.
It’s not unusual for old battlefields to be on private land. A 2007 congressional report found 62 percent of known American battlefields are on what is now private property.
In Mystic, the work is done where landowners agree to it. None of the land can be taken over by the government or the Pequots, or restricted in use.
The work is done with grants from the National Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection Program.
The researchers have already found remnants of English metal uniform buttons, bandoliers and other items that might help mark where settlers marched, camped before the attack and retreated afterward.
“I tell people all the time, history and archaeology are right in your backyards, right under your feet, and this is a classic example of that,” Connecticut State Archaeologist Nicholas Bellantoni said.
