By Dan Murphy
The 23rd annual Ancient Fishweir Project has returned this month to Boston Common, again paying tribute to a time when Native Americans once lived off this land.
The fishweir, which is currently installed near the Charles Street entrance to the park, along the central pathway, is a fence-like structure comprising interlaced brush wood (invasive buckthorn) that closely resembles the fishweirs used by early Native Americans to catch fish, such as herring and other smaller catch.
Again this year, the fishweir installation was built in collaboration with Boston Public school students from the Horace Mann School for the Hard of Hearing and the Josiah Quincy School and support from Jeannie Foster and Thomas Green of the Massachusett Tribe, who are involved with programming, brush collection, and construction of the fishweir itself.
The installation will remain in place through June, including being featured as part of the Making History Day on Boston Common for elementary school students on Monday, June 1, from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., sponsored by the Friends of the Public Garden.
Around the same location on the Common where the fishweir is now located would have been close to the shoreline of the original Shawmut Peninsula, where Native Americans built fishweirs between 3,700 and 5,300 years ago.
Archeologists found remains of 65,000 ancient fishweirs buried in the clay (layers of sediment) 28-40 feet below the streets of the Back Bay when subway excavation got underway in 1913.
Visit www.fishweir.org to learn more about this year’s 23rd annual Ancient Fishweir Project.