Archaeologists in Keene say they'd like to invite the public into the former homes of some very old neighbors.

A little more than two years ago, experts were called to the construction site of the new Keene Middle School off Maple Avenue to take a look at what was thought to be Native American artifacts in the ground. What they found were four well-defined, oval-shaped encampments complete with more than 200 tools, hundreds of animal bone fragments and clues to the Paleo Indian way of life.

“That's when it got exciting,” said Robert Goodby, associate professor of anthropology at Franklin Pierce University in Rindge and lead archaeologist on the site. “What we think we have are the remains of where tents had been set up. So that all of these artifacts are all of the things that would have been contained in an oval-shaped, probably caribou hide-covered tent. And then after people left the site and took down the tents, you still have this oval pattern of debris there. And more than 12,000 years later, we were able to come and see that.”

After an excavation of the site in 2010 and two years of analysis, the researchers involved in the dig are starting to offer talks about the project to anyone interested.

“We are looking at more or less the first human beings to come into New Hampshire. The first human beings to live in what is now Keene,” Goodby said.

Goodby said it's impossible to know for certain, but it's a good bet the camp inhabitants were the ancestors of the Abenaki people.

It was hard living in the area during that time. It was also very different terrain from what is there today, said Chris Dorian, a geologist who studied the Keene site.

“The mountains were the same, the rivers were similar, but the vegetation was very different,” he said.

The area made it good for spotting game and walking. However, the climate at the time was frigid and windy.

From the camps themselves, Goodby said, researchers were able to get a better sense of how the Paleo Indians lived.

The tents were the same size, which suggests they housed more or less the same number of people — which could have been four or five and as many as 10, Goodby said.

The tents were oriented in the same way, and each of the encampments had remarkably similar numbers and types of tools.

This told researchers that not only were the inhabitants all doing similar work — believed to be mostly scraping hides and making stone tools — but also that there wasn't strong evidence of hierarchy. He said since there was no evidence that one family group had more or less or better or worse tools, it was likely they were a very egalitarian people.

“We have other sites from this time period in New Hampshire,” Goodby said. “But none of them have had this degree of clarity, where you can actually see a house floor and say, 'OK, this is where people lived, and this is their work area, and this is where they cooked their food. That is very, very unusual.”

Goodby said the plan is to eventually have a permanent display of the artifacts at Keene Middle School around which a curriculum can be developed.

mplenda@newstote.com