Gallows Hill Site

Hill Site #1 in Redding, Conn., a Late Archaic autumn hunting site used for a few hundred years, may indicate through point typology and raw materials used by occupants that the same site was used by two groups from two different locations.
The residential area known as Gallows Hill in Redding, Connecticut, is quiet and rustic. It had much more sinister beginnings: in February of 1779, Edmond Jones was found guilty of being a spy, and John Smith of the 1st Connecticut Regiment was found guilty of desertion. One was hanged, the other shot, and following, every solider of the three of General Putnam’s brigades was ordered to march by and have a look at the mangled remains. (Todd, 1906).
From that day forward, the area has been branded “Gallows Hill” (Magee, 2002).
The Gallows Hill #1 site in Redding, Connecticut, was owned by Arrowhead Development Corporation in 1999 when Ernest Wiegand conducted a Stage I Archaeological Reconnaissance Survey on the corporation’s behalf. His work turned up prehistoric artifacts in three areas which would later become Gallows Hill #1, Gallows Hill #2, and Gallows Hill #3 (Fig. 1) In 2001, the site was acquired by the Town of Redding and
Charred wood from this feature was radiocarbon dated to sometime between 2010 B.C. and 1850 B.C. (more on this below). It had also been suggested that there may be a house foundation somewhere on the site which would more than likely date to the historic past (Wiegand, personal communication, 2002), and about 75 artifacts from the late 18th and 19th centuries, such as nails, redware, saltglazed stoneware, whiteware, and glass, most of which were found in the top 20 cm of soil, may support the idea that there was definitely such a structure on the site. But these analyses are not included in this report; we are more interested in what happened