Archaeologists Look for Plymouth’s Palisade

PLYMOUTH, MASSACHUSETTS—A team made up of archaeologists and volunteers is looking for traces of the seventeenth-century palisade built by the Pilgrims to protect Plymouth. This original settlement is thought to have sat atop a hill that became a cemetery by the end of the seventeenth century. Ground-penetrating radar has guided the team to an area without graves, where they have found foundations of nineteenth-century structures and artifacts. The researchers think that the nineteenth-century homes may have been built on top of early seventeenth-century homes. “If we could find the remains of the original settlement it would be a huge find…We’re digging here in part because we think we might be close to where one of these [palisade] walls came down from Burial Hill,” archaeologist David B. Landon of the University of Massachusetts Boston told The Boston Globe.