BUSHNELL] NATIVE VILLAGES AND VILLAGE SITES 19 
make war upon them. They cover their cabins with oak bark.” 
(Champlain, (2), II, pp. 63-67.) 
This was evidently a typical coast settlement and_outside the pali- 
sade were. some scattered. wigwams, and the small gardens where 
corn, beans, and other vegetables were raised. A manuscript dating 
from the early part of the seventeenth century, now in the British 
Museum, gives the native names of the principal streams of New 
England flowing into the Atlantic, and also the names of the chiefs 
then occupying their banks. The Saco was known as the Sawaqua- 
tock, ‘‘and there did Dwell Agemohock”’ (Bushnell, (1), p. 236), proba- 
bly at the village mentioned by Champlain., This may have been a 
typical coast settlement and as it was protected by palisades was 
probably a permanent settlement, as mentioned in the narrative. 
In recent years many objects of Indian origin have been found on 
the summit of a rocky cliff on the western side of the mouth of the 
Saco, evidently marking the site of the cluster of wigwams seen by 
the French in the summer of 1605. But it is not usually possible to 
picture so vividly the structures which at one time occupied the 
numerous sites, where implements of stone, fragments of pottery,- 
broken shells and bones, and usually ashes and charcoal, indicate 
the position of some ancient village. 
Nearly a century before Champlain’s first visit to the coast of New 
England, then an unexplored wilderness, Verrazzano, in 1524, passed 
northward along the Atlantic coast. The expedition stopped at 
many places and visited widely separated villages, one of which 
appears to have been at some point near the eastern end of Long 
Island. This was a settlement of an Algonquian tribe and may have 
been a village of the Shinnecock near Montauk Point. It was 
described are 
‘‘We saw their houses made in circular or fond forme 10 or 12 
paces in compass, made with halfe circles of timber, separate one 
from another without any order of building, covered with mattes of 
straw wrought cunningly together, which save them from wind and 
raine. ... The father and the whole family dwell together in one 
house in great number: in some of them we saw 25 or 30 persons.” 
(Verrazzano, (1), p. 299.) 
The ‘‘halfe circles of timber,” mentioned here, probably refer to the . 
circular, dome-shaped wigwams, formed by bending and fastening 
branches or small saplities! and epee the frame thus made with 
mats or pieces of bark, characteristic of the Algonquian tribes. Al- 
though many early writers in New England mentioned and de- 
scribed the habitations of the native tribes, the most interesting and 
comprehensive account may be gathered from that quaint work pre- 
pared by the settler of Providence and first printed in the year 1643, 
