Story of Plymouth Rock
In the November 24, 2016 edition of Scientific American, Dana Hunter wrote an article titled The Real Story of Plymouth Rock.
Plymouth Rock is made of Dedham Granite, a granodiorite that began life around 630 million years ago as part of Gondwana. It traveled with Gondwana to become part of the supercontinent of Pangea, rather like the Pilgrims first living in Leiden, Netherlands before coming to America. Plymouth rock found itself on the American side of the great rift when Pangea split apart, and the Atlantic Ocean was born. You cannot say it crossed an ocean, exactly, as the ocean didn’t exist, but it certainly got to watch the Atlantic form. Like the Pilgrims, it initially spent its time in another part of the continent before landing at Plymouth.
Plymouth Rock is a glacial erratic. Twenty thousand years ago, it was plucked up by the great glaciers that covered huge bits of North America, rafted considerable distances, and then deposited on a coast where human history would be made a long time later. You can see pieces of this rock in many places in New England. The portion of the glacial erratic left behind at Plymouth became the famous rock it is today.
- 200 million years ago – Glacial erratic rock lands on shore after traveling for 400 million years.
- 12,000 years ago – Pokanoket Tribe of Wampanoag Nation settles, calling the area Patuxet. The tribe abandons the settlement in 1616 AD after a plague kills many.
- 1620 AD – Mayflower Pilgrims arrive to find abandoned land, now renamed Plymouth on a map they were carrying, published by explorer John Smith.
