As seen from Route 29 running alongside the Delaware River, the downtown Trenton skyline is changing quite a bit these days. The cluster of State office buildings on South Warren Street, dominated by the Hughes Justice Complex, is being supplemented by the ongoing construction of a new Taxation Building directly in front of the Labor & Industry Building on John Fitch Way.
Remarkably, prior to construction, some fairly substantial traces of Native American occupation were found on the site of the new Taxation Building. Several pits and hearths and numerous artifacts, dating mostly from 400 to 700 years ago, were documented by a Hunter Research archaeological team working over the winter of 2018-2019.
This location, on a floodplain terrace at the mouth of Assunpink Creek, would have been a choice spot in the landscape for local Lenape inhabitants and their forebears, and ample evidence of a sprawling Indian presence once existed here. Now largely destroyed by urban development, occasional pockets of intact archaeological remains still survive – one such pocket was sampled right there in what used to the forecourt of the Labor & Industry Building.