BANGOR DAILY NEWS • August 24, 2025
A group of nine archaeologists from across New England were surehanded from Aug. 11 to Friday when digging for a way to date an artifact believed to be around 10,000 years old. The artifact, a projectile point that could have been used on a spear, dart or as an arrowhead, was found in 1987 but has not been precisely dated. To date the artifact, the archaeologists, led by Nathaniel Kitchel, of Salve Regina University and a research associate at Dartmouth College, found the dig sites in Bradley where it was found and took dirt and artifact samples to carbon date them. The dig is part of a larger initiative to better understand what life was like at the beginning of the period we live in, the Holocene period, which directly followed the ice age. The project is trying to learn more about the environmental and social effects of the transition between these two periods and how that could help future societies.