If there are any records of a wild deer on Martha’s Vineyard over the next 200-odd years, I haven’t seen them. Archaeologists have found strong evidence for this at sites across the island, spanning four millennia.Ĭhronicler John Brereton, who accompanied English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold on his famous 1602 visit to the Vineyard, reported “Deere in great store, very great and large” (together with “Beares, Luzernes, Blacke Foxes, Beavers, Otters, Wilde-Cats, verie large and great, Dogs like Foxes … Conies ”.) When settler Thomas Mayhew bought Lambert’s Cove in 1658, the deed noted that “the hunting of Deire is common.” But it didn’t last long.īenjamin Bassett of Chilmark told author Jeremy Belknap in 1881, “About the year 1720, the last deer was seen on the Vineyard and shot at.” Thus ended more than 4,000 years of our island as a cervine abode, less than 80 years after the first Englishmen settled here.
“depended heavily on the white-tailed deer.” Venison served as the principal meat source for the ancestors of the Wampanoag. Archaeologist William Ritchie found evidence at Squibnocket of an indigenous people whose diet as early as about 2270 B.C.
