Once again this winter VAS volunteers generously contributed hundreds of hours of their time working on important and interesting artifact collections that originated on the Green Mountain National Forest.

Under the supervision of Geoff Mandel (UVM-CAP), VAS VP and uber volunteer Al Oliver - with occasional assistance from Dave Lacy, Brigitte Helzer (VAS Board), and Tim Watkins (USFS) - continued work on the Homer Stone Quartzite Quarry collection (VT-RU-107) at the Consulting Archaeology Program lab. Most VAS members will know that the site is an extensive pre-contact quartzite quarry located along the Mt Tabor/Wallingford town line on the National Forest. By early April (and after four years of processing) the cataloging was finally completed! The next step will be for Geoff, primarily, to do a finer grained analysis of the tool production and the distribution of manufacturing activities at the site.

Meanwhile, a larger VAS contingent (many of whom had worked on Homer Stone in winters past) accepted State Archaeologist Jess Robinson's invitation to spend time at the Archaeology Heritage Center in Barre (housed in the VT History Center). We spent most of our time working on artifacts from the Warren Falls site (VT-WA-180), which the VAS and Forest Service tested and then excavated in several stages between 2013-2015. Material was almost exclusively high quality, homogeneous quartzite debitage with the rare small chert flake mixed in. Some expedient flake tools were recovered, but no diagnostic materials.

The site's small size (less than 100 square meters); location along a travel route (i.e., the Mad River/White River corridors as part of the connection between Lake Champlain and the Connecticut River); preponderance of fine flaking debris, and corresponding lack of large early stage reduction material; lack of debitage with cortex (despite the presence of thousands of river cobbles next to the site); and visual homogeneity of the raw material all contribute to a preliminary conclusion that people were stopping at the site, re-working some of their tool kit and, mostly, making new tools from preforms they brought with them (coincidentally not unlike the bifacial "blank" preforms that were taken out of the Quarry site!). The site's size and lack of well-defined vertical separation of deposits also suggest it may well be a single-component site. All the artifacts were washed, analyzed and cataloged by mid-April and are now awaiting further attention and analysis.

Now, just as the field season is starting up, the Heritage Center crew has turned our attention to the Molodeski Site (VT-BE-155). This extensive pre-contact site is located in the National Forest (and along the Long/Appalachian Trail) on the Stamford/Woodford town line, above 2000' a.s.l. Forest Service personnel and VAS volunteers tested this site in 1991 (yes, 24 years ago!). Participants back then included current VAS members Dave Lacy, Eric Bowman and Megan Battey. Materials are, again, almost exclusively quartzite. At first blush the assemblage seems to reflect a set of activities that lies somewhere between the Homer Stone-style quarry production and the Warren Falls' finish work with a lot of secondary reduction material evident and a curiously large number of large reduction flakes that were not worked any further. We are just beginning to massage this collection, so stay tuned!

Submitted by Dave Lacy