Archaeologist Tim Dinsmore sits in his office. (Molly Rains photo)
Some professions, it’s said, can be put out of mind when the workday ends. Historical archaeology, as Tim Dinsmore will say, is not one of those jobs.
Dinsmore – who is president of the Newcastle Historical Society, a historical archaeologist with the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, a lifetime member of the Maine Archaeological Society, and a member of the Council for Northeast Historical Archaeology — has spent the majority of his life unearthing artifacts from the soil under our feet here in Lincoln County, stringing together his findings to reconstruct the colonial histories of greater Damariscotta and beyond.
“Archaeology is really like detective work,” Dinsmore said on the afternoon of Thursday, April 18, in his Walpole office, surrounded by artifacts, maps, and a formidable collection of reference literature.
“You’re taking all these clues and trying to tell the story accurately, without embellishing it. And that’s important.”
Dinsmore was born in Damariscotta and raised in Newcastle, on Academy Hill, with his three siblings. His father worked at a nearby photography business, Ivan Flye’s Pictorial Studios. Accompanying his father to work fed Dinsmore’s early interest in learning about the past and the local area.
“I used to go with him to work — and, probably, pester him — when I was young,” he said. “I’d see all these local historians flowing in, looking for photographs to write articles in the newspaper. And then police investigators were bringing in crime scene photographs, and there were antiques dealers, artists, and so on … So I saw a wide range of people from the community.”
Dinsmore’s father was a history enthusiast himself, with a particular interest in Native American history. Sometimes, the pair would go out together to look for arrowheads and spear tips.
“I think through (my father’s) love of history, I also fell in love with the history of the area,” Dinsmore said.
Soon, other community members recognized Dinsmore’s passion for archaeology and encouraged him to pursue it further.
At the former Castner School in Damariscotta, the librarian Ms. Welch and her father, a professor, made sure that Dinsmore always had new archaeology books to read. As a high schooler, Dinsmore volunteered at Colonial Pemaquid, and before he had even reached college, Dinsmore recalled, community members were encouraging him to give talks on local history.
“Several people in the community saw my interest in archaeology, and it was between that and my father, I think, that really inspired me to go on,” he said.
Dinsmore attended Lincoln Academy, graduating in 1982. But, he said, his passion for archaeology at the time did not extend to other subjects. After graduating, he initially lacked the confidence to go on to college and instead worked a variety of jobs, including at the grocery store Shop and Save.
It was during this time that Dinsmore met Wendy Longe, the woman he would eventually marry in the Walpole Meeting House in 1989.
As Dinsmore continued to ponder his future, his interest in archaeology was as strong as ever. When Lillian Boynton-Hale, a community member, invited him to check out a cellar hole on her property, Dinsmore acquiesced. Dinsmore, only 18 at the time, initially didn’t expect to find anything particularly notable at the site. However, as he dove into the project, it soon became clear that this was a find that would go on to shape Dinsmore’s adult life and archaeological career.
An initial test pit at the site uncovered artifacts that seemed to date back to the 1700s, Dinsmore said. His interest piqued, he decided to conduct more research on the site.
“This tells you how crazy I was, for someone so young,” Dinsmore laughed. “I did a title search myself, as a teenager, amongst all these lawyers sifting through paperwork.”
His efforts, however extraordinary, soon paid off.
“‘My god,’ I said,” Dinsmore recounted. “(The property owner) was one of the earliest shipbuilders on the Damariscotta River!”
The property’s original title holder was George Barstow, who moved to Maine from Hanover, Mass., in about 1740 to found one of the first shipyards in the area.
Thoroughly convinced of the site’s importance, Dinsmore — still only 18 — paid out of his own pocket for a surveyor to mark out an excavation grid at the site and began the long process of unearthing the homestead’s story.
In his life outside of archaeology, meanwhile, one planned gap year had turned to three, and Dinsmore began to worry that he was missing out on college.
“I said to Wendy one night, ‘You know, I think I’m going to regret not going to college,’” he said.
With her encouragement, Dinsmore enrolled at the University of Maine at Orono in 1985 to study Anthropology with a specialization in archaeology.
Though Dinsmore had worried over whether he would succeed in college, he quickly realized that those fears were unfounded.
“I did better than I ever did in high school because I knew what I wanted to do. I was focused, and I was doing something I love,” he said.
Dinsmore graduated with distinction in 1989. Shortly after, he travelled to the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, to study archaeology at the graduate level.
Dinsmore was thrilled at the opportunities that graduate school entailed, including a memorable stint at the colonial Williamsburg archaeological laboratory.
“This is the stuff that you only hope to do someday,” Dinsmore said.
One encounter while at Williamsburg saw Dinsmore coming face-to-face with Ivor Noël Hume, the center’s former director and author of several seminal archaeological texts.
“I said to him, ‘You’re the reason I got into historical archaeology,’” Dinsmore said.
Hume’s response was memorable.
“He goes, ‘Oh, God, I’ve doomed another person to poverty,’” Dinsmore said with a laugh.
Dinsmore admitted that his choice of profession hasn’t made for the easiest life path.
“It is a hard field, particularly in Maine,” he said. “Sometimes I feel like I sacrifice things … for the good of this history and for archaeology.”
However, he said, his family and the greater community have been supportive, and the work is continually rewarding.
There are still moments in his day-to-day work, Dinsmore said, that remind him of why he initially went down this sometimes “laborious and painstaking” path.
“It’s — wow. You’re holding tangible evidence of the past. That really brings history to life,” he said.
Over the years, Dinsmore has worked with more than 300 volunteers on local projects and has also run educational programs, including an Archaeological Field School run through Coastal Rivers Conservation Trust.
Today, he specializes in the colonial period of the 17th and 18th centuries, excavating sites including taverns, trading posts, ice houses, shipyards, wells, cisterns, burials, forts, privies, black powder compounds, and Native American sites.
At the Barstow site and adjacent sites that he unearthed in the course of his research, Dinsmore has spent 41 years excavating, assessing, and painstakingly cataloging hundreds of thousands of artifacts. His research has provided insight into the day-to-day lives of the earliest shipbuilders on the Damariscotta river as well as their side businesses and the lives of their families, local workers, and enslaved people.
Eventually, Dinsmore hopes to create an exhibit to showcase his findings.
“I want people to know that you don’t have to go off to far-away places. There’s really a lot of history right here, that ties in … to a larger national context, and even beyond.”
This June, Dinsmore and Wendy will celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary; their children, Danny and Julie, are grown, age 29 and 23, respectively.
Dinsmore said he feels more urgency in his work than in the past, because of increasing development, the increasing prevalence of extreme weather events, which can disturb sites with flooding and erosion, and a feeling that he has less time as his career progresses.
For now, Dinsmore intends to continue working on his projects, he said, and hopes to someday write a book. He continues to work on his personal research and on other sites as they come up, and is glad that his career took him down this road.
“I always knew what I wanted to do,” Dinsmore said, “and it hasn’t waned.”
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