North America's Oldest Fish Weir

Moose, saw mills and canoes are common sights on Maine lakes. But, during the summer of 1992, a strange unidentified object appeared in Sebasticook Lake (a mile from I-95 at Exit 157). A severe New England drought caused water levels to drop drastically in the region’s lakes that year. Someone standing on the Sebasticook Lake shore noticed sharpened wooden stakes jutting out of the water. They appeared to be set in a deliberate pattern, not randomly as might normally occur in nature. To solve the puzzling mystery, locals called in the experts – scientists and archaeologists who figured out what it was. The answer was astonishing.

Scientists, after careful study, announced it was a weir. The rest of us would call it a fish trap. Here’s how it worked: Sebasticook Lake is connected to the Atlantic Ocean by way of a river system. Some fish, including the American eel, live in the lake but instinctively mass migrate out to the ocean to spawn. Native people understood that this migration was a perfect opportunity to snare some fish.. Simple but effective, a maze of underwater poles and branches crowded the narrow mouth of the lake. When the fish, called by nature to spawn in the ocean, tried to swim out of the lake, they swam into the trap instead.

This particular weir is remarkable because of its age. Carbon dating shows the first posts were laid nearly 6,000 years ago. That’s before the Egyptian pyramids and before Stonehenge. This weir was used by the Late Archaic-Early Woodland culture for 4,000 years. Over that time, they added to the trap and improved some functions but, basically, the contraption always worked the same way. It was abandoned about 2,000 years ago but the muddy lake floor preserved the wooden stakes. The Sebasticook Site, as it’s now called, is the oldest fish weir in North America.