Why is this archaeological site in the middle of nowhere? The place we now call Vermont is a part of the ancestral homeland of the Western Abenaki people, a place where the Abenaki have lived for around 12,000 years. Over that time, the Abenaki have inhabited a landscape that has changed in ways that are difficult to imagine. When I came upon this archaeological site in the middle of the woods, at first I was like: why is this here? Unlike most archaeological sites that I’ve seen, this one was n