Cooke Scholarship Recipient - 2023


The Board of Directors of the Friends of the Office of State Archaeology (FOSA) is pleased to announce the awarding of June and David Cooke Scholarships to Brianna Rae Zoto. Brianna is a Ph.D candidate at the University of Connecticut. The focus of her work is the Grannis Island, which is located on the east bank of the Quinnipiac River in New Haven about 1.5 miles upriver from the mouth of the Quinnipiac River, r from the mouth of the Quinnipiac River, which empties into New Haven Harbor and ultimately Long Island Sound. The main feature at the site is an extensive shell midden which spreads across the majority of the landform. It actually consists of 2 sites, Grannis Island (which only becomes an island at high tide) and Grannis Beach, at the western end of the Island and is only available as a site at low tide.



Brianna Rae Zoto


The following narrative is excerpted from Brianna's Formal Proposal documentation.

From 1947 to 1949, Howard Sargent led excavations at Grannis Island with volunteers from the New Haven Chapter of the Archaeological Society of Connecticut (ASC). The New Haven ASC chapter continued excavations at Grannis Island and Grannis Beach from 1950 to 1974. Ultimately, a total of 519 six-by-six-foot units were excavated, producing 6,651 artifacts, which include formal lithic tools, debitage, Native ceramics, and faunal remains. Grannis Island has been referred to as "one of the larger, more important sites in the state" and "'a priceless archaeological treasure' due to the large quantity of artifacts and unique features like dog burials documented in 2008.

Securely dating the shell midden and other features from the Grannis Island/Grannis Beach sites is of critical importance to interpretation of this significant Connecticut archaeological site, which has essentially been forgotten for more than 30 years. The sites have the potential to yield important information about the Native American history of Connecticut, as well as illuminate the still poorly understood Orient Phase of the Terminal Archaic period. The project will also demonstrate the utility of using legacy collections for modern archaeological research, hopefully encouraging others to look at the archive as a viable alternative to fieldwork. I propose to publish the results of the radiocarbon analysis in the ASC Newsletter prior to completing my dissertation and publishing the results for a regional or national audience.

Brianna's dissertation research has two main objectives regarding Grannis Island/Grannis Beach: 1) to investigate the substantial Orient Phase component at the sites; 2) to evaluate the efficacy of archival collections for archaeological research. The sites contain a relatively large assemblage of diagnostic artifacts dating to the Orient Phase of the Terminal Archaic period. This cultural period has long intrigued archaeologists, as it straddles the end of the Late Archaic and the beginning of the Early Woodland periods, and seems to have attributes of both eras. Since the Grannis sites have an unusually high density of diagnostic material from the Orient phase, including Orient Fishtail points, steatite bowl fragments, and features, it provides an opportunity to analyze this still-enigmatic cultural period.

She will also use the Grannis collections as a case study to test the utility of archival collections for modern archaeological research and to create a blueprint for extracting meaningful data from legacy collections. Often, archaeologists and graduate students conduct their research through new field excavations, while older collections languish in storage and rarely receive proper cataloguing, analysis, or publication. While working archival collections like Grannis have challenges, usually due to antiquated excavation methods or inconsistent documentation, the hope to show that these kinds of collections can benefit from systematic inventory and analysis, along with the application of modern analytical techniques such as radiocarbon dating.

In order to successfully meet these dissertation research goals, she is requesting funding for eight AMS (Accelerator Mass Spectrometry) radiocarbon dates from charcoal and bone samples from the Grannis Island and Beach sites. I have carefully selected appropriate samples to answer specific questions about the occupational history of the sites and clarify the association of features and diagnostic artifacts.

There is also a need to obtain radiocarbon dates from the Grannis Island shell midden in order to understand the formation and subsequent abandonment of the shell midden. Dating the shell midden is vital to understanding the site in general, as excavators treated the midden as one layer and were not able to distinguish distinct episodes of use. The midden contains diagnostic material from the Late Woodland period, but also has some Terminal Archaic artifacts. Based on these data it is unclear whether the shell midden was used over an approximate 3,000-year span or if it has a more restricted depositional history.

Securely dating the shell midden and other features from the Grannis Island/Grannis Beach sites is of critical importance to interpretation of this significant Connecticut archaeological site, which has essentially been forgotten for more than 30 years. The sites have the potential to yield important information about the Native American history of Connecticut, as well as illuminate the still poorly understood Orient Phase of the Terminal Archaic period. The project will also demonstrate the utility of using legacy collections for modern archaeological research, hopefully encouraging others to look at the archive as a viable alternative to fieldwork. I propose to publish the results of the radiocarbon analysis in the ASC Newsletter prior to completing my dissertation and publishing the results for a regional or national audience.