Early in 2019, during the excavation of a Connecticut Department of Transportation (CT DOT) construction project of the now completed bridge at Old Farms and Waterville Roads (Route 10) in Avon, a 12,500-year-old (10,000 BC) Paleoindian human occupation site was discovered six feet below ground.  The CT DOT contracted Archaeological and Historical Services (AHS) of Storrs, CT to do the excavation.

They uncovered more than 15,000 artifacts that are characteristic of the Early and Middle Paleoindian periods.  The site is named for Brian D. Jones, the late Connecticut State Archaeologist, who led the effort to dig deep based on earlier digs in the area over a forty-year period.

Dr. David Leslie, Senior Archaeologist at AHS, published initial findings in the journal PALEOAMERICA, Jan. 2020, entitled “The Brian D. Jones Site (4-10B): A Multi-Component Paleoindian Site in Southern New England.” According to Leslie, this site is located on a deeply buried Pleistocene levee on the Farmington River in Avon, CT.  It is the oldest-dated occupied site in Connecticut and the only site in the American Northeast with well-defined stratified Early Paleoindian deposits.

At the first public presentation of the site in February 2020, Dr. Leslie explained this will require multi-year analysis before any conclusions can be written about the site and the early people who worked there.  This post-Ice Age site has been fully excavated and the new bridge over the River covers it.  According to Dr. Lucianne Lavin, Director of Collections and Research, Institute for American Indian Studies in Washington, CT near a slightly later Paleoindian site, the last Ice Age in this region began to melt away about 17,500BP (Before the Present).  As it receded, a lush new land was exposed that provided for animal life to return about 13,500BP in the form of tundra-grazing animals such as mastodons, mammoths, horses, giant beaver, caribou, and more.  The ancient communities of the Paleoindians are thought to have begun to arrive in the northeast after that time in search of those animals for food. They were the first settlers of what is now Connecticut and southern New England.  (Connecticut’s Indigenous Peoples, by Lucianne Lavin, 2013, Yale University Press)

The Avon Historical Society, Avon Free Public Library, and Avon Senior Center are partnering on a multi-year series of webinars to break down the many facets of this early time in our world’s history.  Entitled “Unearthing History: The Discovery of a 12,500-Year-Old Paleo-Indian Site Along the Farmington River in Avon, CT” is available via the Avon Public Library website.  At the end of each annual series, Dr. Leslie will present an update on the Brian D. Jones site as well as new theories based on the analysis of the artifacts.

Header photo of the location of the site at the Farmington River courtesy of Howard Wright. Remaining photos courtesy of Archaeological and Historical Services, Storrs, CT.