Crossroads of conflict
On a bitter February day in 2019, the Warren County Sheriff’s Office got a call from a construction crew digging a foundation in Lake George. They had found human bones.
Terry Comeau, the county’s undersheriff, was coroner at the time. He and an investigator drove out to the site where the former Whispering Pines cottage rentals used to stand. What they saw did not look like any modern-day crime scene.
Comeau and his colleagues called David Starbuck, a local archaeologist and professor. Starbuck was in New Hampshire, where he taught at Plymouth State University, but he agreed to come take a look.
When he arrived, the construction site was bustling with people—law enforcement, local officials, journalists. They were there to see the 60-foot-by-60-foot crater with bone fragments sticking out of the dirt.
Starbuck said he thought he was called in to examine a single skeleton. But at the far end of the excavated hole was a row of what appeared to be a dozen grave shafts, sliced through by construction equipment. Centuries-old bones were popping out of the dirt wall.
“It was a burial ground,” Comeau said. “You could tell by the way everything was the same depth. It was uniform.”
Concentrated trauma
Finding human remains was no surprise to Comeau, Starbuck or others who know the history of the region well. Native Americans used Lake George, the Hudson River
