Let me paint you a picture. We're in Damar Scata, Maine. We're on a river about 15 miles

upstream from where it flows into the ocean. It's very manny.

While you were talking, I didn't want to interrupt you, but I think I just saw an osprey go over?

Oh, yeah. There's plenty of ospers around here.

Yeah.

You can even see a bald eagle if we're lucky.

That's Arthur Spies.

He's Maine's state archaeologist.

We're walking along a path that leads down to the water.

Frankly, it looks fairly unremarkable.

So, and this is sort of like, it looks like it used to be an orchard or something

looks like some fruit trees. Yeah. But you know we wouldn't be here if it wasn't

someplace special. There's a reason that I'm here with an

archaeologist. Oh I see, oh wow! I say I was not expecting to get so up close

with him. That's what's left.

In front of where we're standing, there's a little brook running down the hill into the river.

The water has eroded layers of earth, and along the bank of this little creek where you would expect to see just brown, bare, naked earth.

Instead, there's this jagged wall of shockingly white shapes. It's about as tall as a man and from a distance you might think are those rocks?

But as you get closer you see that no, it's not rocks.

This shining perlessant riverbank is actually made up of thousands of oyster shells piled on top of each other, layer after layer.

Arthur has actually dug down into these shells all the way down to the bottom.

It's about six feet deep at the deepest.

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