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When we want to know about the 17th century, we call "Tad" Baker. He is a public archeoalogist with a special knowledge of the murky era in local history, and an excellent ability to explain what was going on back then.

VISIT Tad Baker's professional home page

We know almost nothing about our founders. I don’t mean those straight-laced characters who landed at the mythical Plymouth Rock. Volumes have been written about the Puritans and the Mayflower. Their ship and their village have been rebuilt for tourists. I’m talking, instead, about "our" founders, the men and women who settled coastal New Hampshire and Maine in the early 1600s. Who were those crusty, fishy-smelling, business-minded, superstitious, adventurous people?

Close your eyes and try to picture them. You can’t. There are almost no portraits of early 17^th century "Americans", except of the very rich and influential. There are no surviving intact houses from the first wave of European immigrants. There are no gravestones, few maps, some legends, a bunch of stone cellar holes and precious few written records.

That’s why we have archeologists. We call them in when there’s almost no facts to go on, when history has all but disappeared beneath the surface of the soil. They are the super detectives, the last hope for lost and forgotten souls. But where are the archeologists? Most are hidden in colleges and universities, locked in museum archives, wrapped up in research that can last for decades, teaching classes or working "contract" jobs paid for by private companies. And when they do write up their scholarly research, its often dry reading for we average dudes.

It’s not easy to flush out members of this rare secretive breed, but I’ve spotted one recently online. Prof. Emerson "Tad" Baker of Salem State College in Massachusetts is a specialist in 17^th century northern New England. For 10 years now he and a team of locals have been excavating the Chadbourne archeology site in South Berwick. He recently worked on a site in Kittery and is writing a book about the 1682 Rock-Throwing Devil incident in New Castle, NH. (See related story in HISTORY)

"For far too many people, Massachusetts is synonymous with New England, "Baker says. "That’s not the case now and it was not the case then."

"As a kid growing up in Massachusetts, loving history, I didn’t even realize there were people living in Maine in the 1600s. That’s how sanitized the history was."

Baker met his wife, a "Mainer", while attending Bates College in 1977. They have lived there ever since. He commutes from a 200-year old farmhouse in York through the NH coast to Salem, a town famous for its 17^th century witch hunts.

Baker heads the History Department at Salem State, a faculty of 14 full-time and an equal number of part-time educators. He is also webmaster of the department web site, a rare thing in an era when colleges and universities tend toward a centralized (read "monolithic") online presence. He says his colleagues realized early that history research has undergone a revolution since the Internet. Huge amounts of historical content has been digitized. The National Archive recently announced the release of 50 million documents on its web site alone.

"We had a web page ready to run even before the college had a presence established online," Baker says.

About 80% of the department have some web presence, Baker says, some of it very sophisticated. The history faculty also makes constant use of ’blackboard" web sites, password protected pages accessible only to students. He makes a point of teaching students how to separate good data from bad data online – a skill all teachers need to emphasize.

Baker’s own homepage leads to a wealth of new data on the 1600s in the Maine and Piscataqua regions, as well as links to "public archeology" and witchcraft data. Especially important are the photos of artifacts discovered over the years at the Chadbourne site, an archaeological time capsule of life for a first-generation Maine family.

Because they were a wealthy family, over 20,000 artifacts have been recovered so far. Each hand forged nail, button, clay pipe stem and broken tool tells us more about our forebears. An elaborately decorated door hinge, a key, pairs of iron scissors and even a coin shed more precious light on the 17^th century Chadbourne history. This family purchased their land from the Indians in 1643 and were burned out of their comfortable home by Native Americans during King William’s War in 1690.

Baker’s homepage resides on Salem State’s "edu" domain. The school offers faculty a block of space on its servers and a password from which they can FTP the data to the Internet. Baker uses basic OCR text scanning software to create Microsoft Word files. He uses Netscape Composer, an almost primitive web page tool for what he calls "quick and dirty" posting of content. You have to remember to type the "tilde" or you won’t find his homepage.

"It’s low tech stuff," Baker says. "I just try to get as much information as

possible up there. It can be out of date. I’m constantly ashamed about that. The hard part is finding the time."

But we’re not complaining. The more Baker adds to his site, the more we learn about the way America, in this neck of the woods, really began. And more than all that, Baker’s email address is right there on his homepage. Besides giving frequent and fascinating public lectures, writing highly readable books and responding quickly to phone inquiries, the professor is accessible to the public via the Web.

"I am the department’s public historian," Baker explains on his web site, "meaning I teach a variety of courses on topics like museums, archaeology, material culture, and architectural history -- courses that relate to historians working in the public sphere. Before coming to Salem State I was an historical archaeologist and a museum director."

Indiana Jones has set the bar fearfully high for archeologists. The fictional Jones (like his female counterpart, tomb raider Laura Croft) not only teaches classes, but can fly any plane, shoot any bad guy and outrun any ancient booby trap. Real life archaeologists spend much of their time hunkering just below ground in damp rectangular pits. They wield small shovels, surgical trowels and paintbrushes to preserve the delicate details of what dead generations left behind.

"Doesn’t it behoove us as historians to work with the public – to be willing to act as advisors on movies and TV shows and to curate exciting exhibits?" Baker asks. "I think that in most of these cases, the truth is more compelling than the Hollywood mythology."

Baker points to his upcoming book on "Lithobolia", still a year or two away from publication. What could be more interesting, he asks, than a 17^th century devil battering a house with rocks for three months? Baker has added the full text of the supernatural 1682 account to his web site. His work on the true human origins of the deadly Salem witch trials offer insight to the way our ancestors reacted to a dangerous and frightening world. Those are lessons we might need to relearn in our own dangerous and fearsome times.

History is not as simple as school textbooks implied. Icons like Puritan founding fathers became nationally accepted, but they over simplified the founding of the nation.

"There was not one New England," Baker emphasizes. "It just wasn’t’ that simple."

Much of the real New England still lies under the soil of coastal New Hampshire and Maine where settlers arrived as early as 1610. There are still untapped resources here on property untouched for over 300 years. If enough artifacts surface, we may come to know our 17^th century founder much better – and gain a deeper insight into what America is really about.