Careful exploration of these village sites has been lacking, notwithstanding all the street grading and extensive building operations which have metamorphosed much of the surface of the present borough. Their neighbors on the Fort Hamilton tract, known as Nayack, were some of those Manhattan Indians who had sold their home-lands to the Dutch in 1626. Their territory extended on the east to the boundary of the old township of Newtown, wherein their neighbors and probably near relatives, the Rockaway, were resident.

Gabriel Furman23 fortunately recorded

INDIAN NOTES

KINGS COUNTY

some early observations of sites occupied by the Marechkawick. In 1824, when the street development of modern Brooklyn was in progress, "heads of Indian arrows, beds of oyster and clam shells, denoting the former residence of the aborigines, are frequently found in different parts of the town." There were thus, in all probability, several groups situated within the area occupied by the Marechkawick, settled in favorable situations about the broad waters and marshes of the Wallabout and the Gowanus which bounded the old township.

The most definite of these early discoveries is a site (66) which was exposed in the year 1826, on an eminence in the Fourth ward, which Furman precisely locates at Bridge street between Front and York streets, where, on a grass-grown hill surmounted by three conspicuous buttonwood trees, there were found burnt stones doubtless forming part of the fireplaces of native lodges. Below the sod an extensive deposit was uncovered, consisting of ashes, shells, and carbonized material, with which were