Sat Dec 12, 02026, 10:30AM EST
Robert Goodby
Field Trip to the Weymouth Esker and a 15th-Century Dugout Canoe
Walk Weymouth's Great Esker, then see a 15th-century dugout canoe and hear archaeologist Robert Goodby on Native American canoes.
Did you know there is a Native American dugout canoe from the 1400s less than an hour from Boston? Long Now Boston is heading south for a field trip through deep time in Weymouth. We'll start with a self-guided walk along the Great Esker, a long ridge of sand and gravel laid down by meltwater streams under the glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age.
Then we'll head over to Tufts Library to see a dugout canoe found in Weymouth's Great Pond in 1965, when a drought dried up the pond and revealed it preserved in the mud. Carbon dating places it in the mid-1400s, when the Massachusett and Wampanoag peoples lived in the area now known as the South Shore. The Wampanoag word for this kind of boat is mishoon. You can attend just the talk; the esker walk is optional.
Archaeologist Dr. Robert Goodby of Franklin Pierce University, author of A Deep Presence: 13,000 Years of Native American History, will then give a talk on Native American canoes. For thousands of years, canoes were central to Native life in New England, and a few dozen dugouts have since been recovered from ponds and lakes across the region. Dr. Goodby will share what we've learned from them.
What survives from a civilization, and what does it tell us about the people who made it? What might our own distant descendants want us to have saved for them? It's a fitting trip for Long Now thinkers.
Schedule: 10:30 AM, meet at the Osprey Overlook Park parking lot (87 Wharf St, Weymouth) for a walk of up to 4 miles round trip along the esker; turn back whenever you like. Around noon, lunch together at a restaurant nearby. 2:00 PM, Dr. Goodby's talk at Tufts Library (46 Broad St, Weymouth), followed by a deep time social hour. Rain or shine.
How it works: Register here so we know who's coming. If you come to the esker walk, join us for lunch nearby, or bring your own and eat in the library's café area (no food is sold there). The library talk requires its own free registration, which opens November 21. We'll email the link to everyone registered as soon as it opens; please sign up right away, since space is limited. Both stops are on the Greenbush commuter rail line from South Station: the esker is a few minutes' walk from East Weymouth, and Tufts Library is a short walk from Weymouth Landing, one stop away. If you're driving, there's parking at the esker.
Photo: Great Esker Park by NewtonCourt, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
