An archaeological study of Burying Hill in Bourne found at least 15 burial sites that likely belonged to local Indigenous people.
The study’s preliminary results—presented to the public on Thursday, May 7 in Bourne—support the Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe’s belief that Burying Hill is an ancient burial ground for their ancestors.
That belief was based on oral tradition and historic documents, and the tribe sought to confirm it in an application to the town of Bourne in 2024 for funding for a study of Burying Hill. The application came as an abutter to Burying Hill was planning a large development on his property at 829 Scenic Highway. Tribal members were concerned their ancestors’ remains would be disturbed in the process, according to the Bourne Enterprise.
After months of back-and-forth and continuances in public meetings, the property owner agreed to scale back his building project and donate more than half of the land at 829 Scenic Highway back to the tribe.
Meanwhile, the tribe’s request for town funding to do a study of Burying Hill was approved. The town and the tribe partnered with research scientist John Steinberg of the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Steinberg and his team used ground-penetrating radar to do the survey. It’s a non-invasive way to investigate possible burials, because instead of relying on excavation, it uses a machine that sends radio waves into the ground. The machine also has a receiver that gathers information about how and when those radio waves get sent back up from the ground. The end result is a series of fuzzy, wavy black and white images called radargrams, which can provide information about what lies beneath the surface.
The survey of Burying Hill in spring 2025 covered just about 12 percent of the area, Steinberg told a packed audience at a Bourne Conservation Commission meeting last week.
“We did a survey every 20 centimeters all the way across,” he said. “We mapped every rock, every tree, because we need to be able to follow the roots back to the trees and we want to see if any of the rocks might be burial markers.”
After they collected the data, Steinberg and his team analyzed the results before presenting them to the tribe and eventually, the public.
The analysis found at least 15 areas that are likely to be burials of Wampanoag people. This is based, in part, on the differences in burial traditions between Christian settlers and Native people, including the direction and positioning of the body.
Beyond burials, Steinberg and his team were looking for evidence of an early tribal meetinghouse on Burying Hill. So far, he said, they haven’t found any evidence. But that doesn’t mean the meetinghouse wasn’t there. Steinberg said it’s hard to find evidence of old buildings that didn’t have basements.
Also, based on the location of another artifact—a pot found on the banks of the old herring river, since disrupted by the Cape Cod Canal—evidence of early Wampanoag life is probably nearby, Steinberg said.
Steinberg said he next wants to look at the area between that pot and Burying Hill to see if it contains the remnants of a village, as he suspects.
Early Native villages changed quickly during the period of first contact, Steinberg explained.
“Mostly because of, essentially the genocide that's happening with contact,” he said in an interview with CAI.
Steinberg described another site on Cape Cod in which archaeology revealed there was more to the story. In collaboration with the National Park Service, Steinberg investigated the site of an old colonial tavern in Wellfleet.
“Turned out, they put the colonial tavern on top of a series of long-term Native American villages. And even at the time the colonists were there, it was full of Native Americans,” he said. With so much still unknown, Steinberg continued, “that's why I'm so desperate to find whatever is associated with this potentially very early set of burials [in Bourne].”
At the first public showing of the preliminary results of Steinberg’s survey this month, Steinberg said that when tribal members first approached him about the project, he had joked, “We know so little that even if I do a bad job, we'll still learn something.”
Jackie Mehtugq Week Saltalamacchia was the tribal member who made the first call to Steinberg. She was at the Bourne Conservation Commission meeting last week, where Steinberg presented his team’s findings.
“We move really fast in this world, and sometimes we don’t stop to think about how to care for the land, and that the land has its own rights,” she told CAI after the meeting. “If we slow down a little bit, sometimes we can protect those sacred things that mean so much.”
Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe Chairwoman Melissa Ferretti said there are currently no plans in the works to continue the ground-penetrating radar study at Burying Hill.
“We have had some very early conversations about what a future phase might look like,” she wrote in an email to CAI. “But nothing is currently in development and no additional work is underway.”
