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It all started with a groundhog. In 1955, one of the creatures led Albert Miller to a cache of artifacts on his land in Avella, Pa., which he then covered and kept secret, waiting for the chance to bring in an expert to examine it. The site would end up being the Meadowcroft Rockshelter, one of the country’s most significant archaeological finds. Now, a team has returned to the Rockshelter for a new excavation, and members of the public are invited to watch it unfold.
On June 8, archaeologist Dr. James Adovasio, who led the first excavation of the site back in 1973, returned with a team of archaeologists with the goal of extracting “material and remnants from a prehistoric fire pit at the Rockshelter used by inhabitants thousands of years ago,” according to a press release. For the next three weeks, visitors will be able to watch the dig during the site’s regular operating hours. There will even be exclusive tours of the Rockshelter led by Adovasio.
David Scofield, director of the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter and Historic Village, which is located about 34 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, says the dig will give visitors a chance to see the painstaking work involved in archaeology.
“And particularly from the Indiana Jones movies, you know, we tend to have this romanticized view of archaeology, but in reality, there’s a lot of tedium,” Scofield tells Pittsburgh City Paper in a phone interview.
Adovasio and his team of University of Pittsburgh students originally discovered “nearly two million artifacts and ecofacts, including ancient stone tools, pottery fragments, and evidence of ice-age fire pits during a six-year excavation of the Rockshelter.” The discoveries concluded that the rock ledge overhang, naturally formed by erosion from the nearby Cross Creek, served as a campsite for prehistoric hunters and gatherers 19,000 years ago. This predates the Clovis people of New Mexico, then believed to be the first humans to set foot in the United States.
Scofield adds that, while “the protocols of the actual manual excavation haven’t changed a lot” since Adoviasio and his team first set up at the site, technological advancements “have made a big difference.”
“Probably the best example is the way the sites are mapped,” says Scofield. “Historically, in 1973, when they started, they would have been mapping it all by hand. … Well, since the 1990s, they’re using now what’s called an infrared theodolite. It’s essentially a laser transit that has a computer. So it’s, it’s pinpointing the exact locations of things and generating a computer map. So it speeds that process up incredibly.”
Scofield, who has overseen the Rockshelter since 1993, including two previous excavations in 2013 and 2019, explains that, because the site sits under a large roof meant to prevent damage from the elements, “the sediment profiles dry out, and occasionally, we get cracking that destabilizes specific areas.”
“There are two main areas where the work will take place, and the one, in particular, is right adjacent to that stack of fire pits that does go back thousands of years,” says Scofield. “And so there’s a pretty good chance that there will be some material there that will be left over from when those fire pits were active.”
Adovasio and his team, which includes his wife Dr. Judy Thomas, will recut those areas, all the while collecting any artifacts that are still in their original placements.
Scofield emphasizes that, while the Rockshelter will serve as the main attraction during the dig, Meadowcroft overall tells the “big story of 19,000 years of a human presence” in western Pennsylvania. He points to “several outdoor interpretive areas,” including recreations of Native American villages spanning from the hunter-gatherer period to when agriculture was introduced. From there, the area covers the arrival of European settlers with an 18th-century frontier trading post and 19th-century village “that looks at settled rural life” up through the Industrial Revolution.
Visitors can also explore, among other attractions, a preserved one-room school house and homestead, both of which were actually used by people living in the area, as well as a museum featuring displays on farm equipment, horse-drawn transportation, and other examples of bygone life in the region.
Scofield believes there are still “many people in our region that don’t know that Meadowcroft exists, let alone understand that it is the oldest site of human habitation in North America, and it’s a very significant archaeological site.” He sees the latest excavation as demonstrating what the Rockshelter revealed, and continues to reveal about early life in North America.
“We are the stewards at the site, and it is an internationally significant archaeological site, and there’s still a lot to be learned from it,” says Scofield. “So making sure that we are doing everything possible to preserve the site, and to continue to study, is part of our mission. And so not only from a scientific standpoint, making sure that we’re caring for the excavation, and, when necessary, as it is now, to do some excavation to prevent any further damage.”
He adds, “But we also have a responsibility as a museum and educational institution to share this with the public and to educate on what archaeology is all about and what information we have learned from this site, and why it’s important. And you know, it’s pretty exciting to understand what this site has revealed about everyday life for prehistoric people in our area and the wealth of material that has been produced from this site is really amazing. And really creates a great picture of prehistoric life here in Western Pennsylvania.”
Meadowcroft Rockshelter And Historic Village. 10 a.m.- 4 p.m. Wed.-Sun. 401 Meadowcroft Road, Avella. heinzhistorycenter.org/meadowcroft
This article appears in Jun 8-14, 2022.
