Just a few hundred yards away from the din and noise of the Ledyard bridge is a site where silence is predominant. Wielding trowels and brushes, six individuals crouch over and in square holes dug out of the earth seeking to recover and reconstruct the lifeways of people who lived here more than a century ago.
These archaeologists, led by Research Supervisor Belinda Cox, are analyzing the remains of a 19th-century house.
Piles of dirt fringe the site, deposited there after being depleted of their artifacts.
The third phase of the excavation, which began early this month and concluded yesterday, dealt "with opening up a large portion of the site to establish the date and size of the site," Cox said.
"We also wanted to mitigate what would be affected by the Ledyard Bridge construction," she added as the cranes and bulldozers at the construction site roared nearby.
"In phase one, we found approximately 5,200 artifacts," Cox said. "We've certainly doubled that number, if not tripled it in phase three."
Cox said the goal of the excavation is to identify and mitigate the cultural resources that are affected by the on-going construction of Ledyard Bridge.
Because the Ledyard Bridge construction project is federally funded, the 1966 Historic Preservation Act required archaeologists "to conduct cultural and environmental resource management studies," Cox said.
Research conducted by Cox and her six-member team shows the site once contained a house owned by the Lewis family, who "were active participants in much of the early history of the local settlements," according to an informational pamphlet about the third phase of the excavation.
Several artifacts from the Lewis house lay in display cases at the site, including a brass buckle, ceramics of both British and American origin, gun flints, hairpins, pipe stems, a silver cuff link, a silver-plated spoon, a thimble and various animal bones.
The research Cox and her team, from the Archaeology Research Center of the University of Maine at Farmington, are doing is sponsored by the New Hampshire Department of Transportation and the Vermont Agency of Transportation.
Cox said artifacts from the Lewis house will be taken to UMF, where they will be cleaned, analyzed, and dated.
They will then be archived at the University of Vermont in Burlington, and may be shared with the Norwich Historical Society.
The site consists of a builder's trench, which may have also been a house cellar, a trash pit and several undefined structural remnants, she said.
Phase one of excavation, conducted last fall, Cox said, focused on surveying the site and digging small holes to see if any part of the site had been left intact.
The research team also compiled background information by looking at deeds and other legal documents to establish there had been a building on the location, she said.
Completed last fall, "phase two of excavation involved testing to determine the size of the site and determine what parts of the site were disturbed or intact," Cox said.
"The site is significant because it was constructed during an early period of economic growth, and the Lewiston was one of the earliest crossings of the Connecticut River, so it served as a hub for the trading of goods and merchandise," Cox said. "It can give us a lot of insight into that time period."
The Hanover-Norwich area became a center for the businesses of local and regional farming, lumbering, light industry, travel and marketing activity in the 1760s, according to the informational pamphlet.
Lewiston, a part of Norwich, became the clearinghouse for activity until the early 20th century because of its location on the Connecticut River, the pamphlet stated.
As the use of the automobile became more prevalent and more bridges were constructed all along the Connecticut River, traffic through Lewiston began to dwindle.
Soon all that was left of this one-time hub of activity were a few houses along the roadside.
The pamphlet described how nine of the remaining structures were razed in the 1960s to accommodate the interstate highway system.
Cox said the former building on the excavation site was one of those destroyed in the 1960s.
"Our research showed that there was a building here and it had been razed in 1968 with the construction of Interstate 91," Cox said. "But we didn't know that the site was going to be as intact as it is."
Now that excavation has been completed, the site will be filled in with dirt, she said.
"The Norwich Historical Society will definitely sponsor talks about the excavation during Vermont Archaeology Week next May," Cox said.
According to Anthropology Professor Deborah Nichols, Dartmouth faculty were not involved in the excavation because the work was contracted.
UMF "bid for the jobs just like a company would," Nichols said. "That's not something that we do here."
Due to its role in the formation and development of riverside transportation, the site is eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, a list of the country's most important historic resources, according to the pamphlet.
