Robbins Museum of Archeology and Ethnology

This arrowhead may be the oldest
manmade thing I have ever seen. 
The oldest thing I can remember 
seeing before this is a vessel from 
Mesopotamia from 5000 BC 

    On Saturday Laurie and went to a place I had only found out about on Friday. It is an archeology museum in Middleboro, MA. I was just trying to find something to do on Saturday when I stumbled upon this small museum. It is just a short distance off of I-495 in Middleboro. I told Laurie about it on Saturday morning and she was game. Since I'd never heard of this museum and it was in Middleboro and not in Boston, Providence, or Worcester, I didn't have high expectations.

   The museum was easy to find following along with my GPS. Parking was also easy because there was a lot directly across the street. The admission was five dollars. When we walked into the main door, we were greeted by a very nice cashier and also an extremely enthusiastic docent.  Though the walk through the museum is self-guided, the docent went into the first room with us and explained a bunch  of stuff about artifacts. The docent, a retired teacher, was happy to tell us about some of the stone tools in cases. It didn't take us long to realize that this woman was going to teach us a lot more than if we just walked around ourselves.

   The museum is full of artifacts from Native Americans that lived in southeastern MA from right after the Ice Age up until settlers wiped them out. There are only three or four rooms so it wouldn't take too long to see everything. However, we were pleasantly intrigued and interested in the stuff we were seeing. There were plenty of arrowheads, axes, and spears on display. There was also Native American pottery from stone to clay. There were interesting things such as stones to weigh down cast nets and clam shells used as utensils. There is a model of a Native settlement that was found in MA. The settlement was excavated and the model is to scale of what it would have looked like.

   The docent came back to one of the rooms and found us. She asked us if we minded her "annoying" us, to which I told her she can annoy us all she wants. We were really enjoying her talking to us. It is one thing to see an ax but quite another to have her tell you it isn't just an ax. She pointed to a dark spot on the stone that was discolored. The discoloration was tree sap. A Native during King Philips War poured sap on the stone, lit it on fire, and threw it into a house as the original Molotov Cocktail. If she wouldn't have been in the room, we would have had no idea that particular ax was used to light up a settler's home during the bloodiest war ( by percentage of the population) in American history.

   The coolest thing in the museum is a Mastodon tusk  found by a fisherman in Mt Hope Bay. I have to say, the museum, though small is really interesting. 

Come on, I had to take a photo of this guys 
name, especially after the title of my last post.

   However, what I think the coolest thing about the museum is that real archeologists are in the museum. We talked to one archeologist for thirty plus minutes. He knew so much and had been on multiple digs. Somehow we got talking about Vikings, which turned out to be his area of expertise. We talked about sites in Greenland, Iceland, and Newfoundland. We ( I asked questions and he answered them) discussed Eric the Red and Leif Ericson. He showed pictures on his phone of sites he had been to in those countries. I could have talked (listened) to him for hours. We did find out from him that the museum holds talks the first Friday of each month. It is pretty special to have a one on one conversation with someone with so much knowledge.

Mastodon Tusk

   If you get a chance I highly recommend you visit it. It is well worth five dollars. It is only open on Saturdays from 10-2.  You would probably only need an hour to see everything. If you have any questions, why not talk to the archeologist that are there? It is pretty rare to talk to someone that studied these things all of their life. They've been to the digs and understand how native people truly lived.

https://www.massarchaeology.org/

This is the ax used as a Molotov Cocktail

A dug out canoe