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QUERY: SILVER PENNY REPORTED FOUND IN SHELL MIDDENWeb site visitor Mal Carey writhes Have any of your readers ever encountered a published account of a find of a Stephen I Silver Penny in the Damariscotta Whaleback Shell Midden? Figure 1 below shows the scope of the oyster shell heap. Natives harvested oysters along the Damariscotta River for perhaps 2000 years. A considerable number of archaeological artifacts were encountered by the Peabody Museum and the workers excavating the site for lime and "chicken scratch". The silver penny was supposedly found in the working face of the heap. 
Interesting. I've not heard of any such coin find. Can anyone help? Thanks. -Editor
Archaeological evidence indicates that about 12,000 years ago, people began migrating into areas that had once been occupied by the last great ice sheets, including the region we know today as Maine. From the middle and late 1800's up to the present time, researchers have studied places where these people left evidence of how they lived. In the coastal region of Maine, shell middens, also known as shell heaps or mounds, are one of the more common types of sites that document methods of food-gathering. Two of these middens are by far the deepest such sites on the Atlantic coast north of St. John's River in Florida (Bourque and Weddle, 1995). For more information, see:
Wayne Homren, Editor The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org. To submit items for publication in The E-Sylum, write to the Editor at this address: whomren@gmail.com To subscribe go to: https://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/esylum All Rights Reserved. NBS Home Page Contact the NBS webmaster 
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