Meet Connecticut’s own Indiana Jones
FORMER STATE ARCHAEOLOGIST NICK BELLANTONI IS DEDICATED TO PRESERVATION
As a boy, Nick Bellantoni didn’t play in the sandbox to dig for artifacts, but he nonetheless grew up to be a real-life Indiana Jones.
As Connecticut’s state archaeologist, a role he held for just over 27 years from 1987 to 2014, he has likely explored more tombs than his fictional counterpart. Chief among his wide range of responsibilities was the preservation of archaeological sites. He was also involved in investigating criminal cases, identifying skeletal remains and has even been able to repatriate a few ancestors to their families.
Coming out of the military service in the 1970s, Bellantoni went to school on the G.I. Bill and initially thought he would go into business administration. A chance decision to take an elective class in anthropology and archaeology changed all that. It was here, he said, where he found his passion and earned a doctorate in archaeology.
“It just kind of all fell into place and I’m grateful to have had an amazing career,” he said.
One of his local discoveries happened in Jewett City in the state’s northeastern corner in 1990. Several hundred years ago, especially in eastern Connecticut, farmers would often bury family members at home in the backyard, Bellantoni said. Decades later, those farms might be gone and new owners are now building houses or commercial enterprises. A sand and gravel operation was clearing a hill in at a Jewett City site that year when one weekend, heavy rains unearthed an unmarked series of graves.
“Nobody knew there was a graveyard up on this hill they were mining until the bones literally started sliding down the hill,” he said.
“We got called in with the police and the medical examiner’s office and found a burial ground dated as early as 1757. We were rescuing these individuals off the cliffs so that they could be not only researched in terms of who they were but also to see that they were properly reburied.”
Bellantoni said while most of the bodies were buried and their skeletons positioned in accordance with Christian burial patterns, there was one notable exception. One body of a 55-year old man, identified on his coffin lid as “JB 55,” had his thigh bones broken and crossed against his torso, his rib cage broken into and skull decapitated from his body.
“So the question was ‘What the heck is going on here?’ We had never seen a burial quite like this,” he said, saying they soon learned that it was tied into the tuberculosis epidemic during this time that led to the New England Vampire Panic. Germ theory was not then understood, so some New England families became convinced that this disease they called consumption was spread by the dead — vampires in particular. To protect their families, people would desecrate the bodies of family members who died of TB in order to keep them in their graves so they could not continue to spread the illness to the living.
During his tenure as state archaeologist, he was called out to quite a few cases from vandalized graves to unmarked burial sites that were accidentally discovered during construction projects. He has worked with colleagues who specialize in DNA and has used his skills and historical and genealogical records to identify remains.
“Primarily my training is in the morphological characteristics of the bone that are indicative of sex, trauma, lifestyle, injuries and different things like that,” he said.
After he retired, he wrote his first book in 2018, “The Long Journeys Home: The Repatriations of Henry ‘Opukaha‘ia and Albert Afraid of Hawk,” that chronicled the archaeological disinterment, forensic identifications and ultimate return of these two people who had very different lives but shared similarities in that they ended up both buried in Connecticut — far from their native homes. At the request of their descendants, Bellantoni led the effort to repatriate the skeletal remains of the naturalized Hawaiian and Native American back to their respective communities and families to be re-buried according to their cultural traditions.
In his latest book published in 2020, “And So the Tomb Remained,” he demystifies forensics in five case studies. Far from being dry scientific reports, these stories are written to be entertaining. Bellantoni shares cases involving family mausoleums and tombs where he was called in to identify and restore human skeletal remains to their original burial placements when vandalized through occult rituals or to identify unrecorded burials in restoration projects. He will share stories from this book in a talk Aug. 29 at 2 p.m. at the New Haven Museum’s Pardee-Morris House.
“We got called into some pretty interesting things and because of our work, families would even contact us,” he said. While most of his work was at Connecticut burial sites, he was once called to Germany to identify a skull reputed to be Adolf Hitler’s. Spoiler: it wasn’t.
The most satisfying part of his archaeology work, Bellantoni said, was helping families today identify and, in some cases, repatriate their ancestors.
“I have always said what I do is I preserve heritage,” he said. “Whether it’s an archaeological site or a burial, I am really preserving the heritage of all of us, individually and collectively... to me those are the most powerful things when we can make a connection with the present.”
“IT JUST KIND OF ALL FELL INTO PLACE AND I’M GRATEFUL TO HAVE HAD AN AMAZING CAREER.”