PA Archaeologists Discover
Stone Tools Dating Back 17,000 Years
[Original headline: Pennsylvania discovery a
bone of contention in archaeology circles ]
HARRISBURG — We are preoccupied during October with the usual rush of events — school schedules, football games, job demands and even the background noise of the political campaigns to some extent. But October is also a good month to devote some time to another activity.
It's a perfect time to discover the evidence of the prehistoric peoples who lived in Pennsylvania thousands of years ago.
October is Pennsylvania Archaeology Month. As part of the observance, there are a series of events across the state — open houses, lectures and archaeological digs — to help the public understand how previous generations went about their daily lives.
The thing that many people may not realize is that Pennsylvania is at the forefront of an intense academic debate over how the New World was settled.
For decades, the accepted wisdom was that the first humans crossed the then-frozen Bering Strait connecting Siberia and Alaska and settled as far south as New Mexico about 11,500 years ago.
But discoveries at the Meadowcrowft Rockshelter about 30 miles southwest of Pittsburgh have shaken this theory to the core. Archaeologists have uncovered stone tools and other artifacts deep in the shelter that have been carbon-dated to at least 17,000 years ago. This suggests that humans traveled the breadth of the Americas much earlier and farther than had been supposed.
Critics say the dating is skewered by the leaching of acid drainage from coal mines in the area. But Dr. James Adovasio, director of Mercyhurst College Archaeological Institute in Erie, said in a lecture at the state museum here that Meadowcroft's findings have been reinforced by the discovery of similar prehistoric sites in southern Chile and Virginia.
Adovasio said humans came to America by land and sea, and the culture they brought with them is far more complex than the image we have of hunters stalking Ice Age mastodons.
Adovasio asks us to think what it must have been like for those people to look out at the horizon and realize there was not one trace of campfire smoke that belied the presence of other humans.
"It (New World migration) represents the last great land mass to which humans ever went," he adds.
On an island in the middle of the Susquehanna River, you can see a reconstruction of a dwelling that people of the Monongahela culture would have lived in sometime between A.D. 1050 and the early 17th century. This dwelling stands near the parking lot on City Island, a popular recreation spot in Harrisburg that was once the camp site of prehistoric peoples. The reconstruction of the circular-shaped, bark-covered Monongahela dwelling is part of a genre known as experimental archaeology. What archaeologist James Herbstritt of the state Historical and Museum Commission has done is to gather the necessary building materials (saplings, bark and cornstalks) and construct the dwelling in a configuration based on evidence found at an archaeological site in western Pennsylvania.
When archaeologists undertake these type of projects, they get a better understanding of how people actually went about building and living in typical dwellings. The Monongahela dwelling has a subterranean extension that probably served as a root cellar to store vegetables, reports Herbstritt. The temperature in this room is about 15 degrees cooler than elsewhere.
• Story originally published by:
Pocono Record / PA - Oct 13.02
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