Plymouth Archaeological Rediscovery Project (PARP)
Aptucxet Trading Post Project
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 The Aptucxet trading Post, aka the Trading House at Manomet, was built circa 1626-1627 by the colonists at Plymouth.  Here they built a small house and kept a couple of men to go in search of trade in wampum to the south in Narragansett Bay.  This trading establishment was slow to turn a profit and was soon eclipsed by the trading house at Cushnoc on the Kennebec River in what is now Maine.  The end of this house came in 1635 when a dramatic hurricane blew the roof of the structure off and left nothing but the posts of the house standing in the ground.  The house may have in fact been abandoned much earlier as it never appears in the colonial records or reports between its construction and use as a meeting place for an ambassador from the New Netherlands and its final destruction in 1635.

Contemporary view of Ezra Perry (Aptucxet) House
image.jpg

The Aptucxet Trading Post Project was conducted in 1995 by the author, Craig S. Chartier, and the late Dr. Barbera Luedtke and the University of Massachusetts Boston as a summer field school. We had set out to discover whether the site that was tauted as the Aptucxet Trading Post in Bourne Massachusetts really was a circa 1627 structure.  Before work had begun, the artifact assemblage that had been excavated in the 1920s by Percival Hall Lombard was reexamined with the result being that we had serious douibts that the 1627 site was located where the Bourne Historical Society believes it is.
The following information is the end result of our fieldwork in 1995 and several years of research and analysis. 
 

Bourne Historical Society Aptucxet Trading Post Museum Website, a slightly different take on the archaeology of this site