Over the next month or so, I'll be sharing some thoughts, images and video from an archaeological excavation here in Central Pennsylvania. I should state for the record that these observations are mine, and not those of any of the agencies, institutions or other folks involved in the project. My goal is simply to share a little bit of the past with everyone, and to give readers who don't do what I do for a living an inside view of archaeology.
Here's the basics.
This site is in Centre County, Pennsylvania. It's one of a number of stone tool workshops used for millennia along the banks of a stream. Just uphill from the site is a source of reddish yellow stone known colloquially as jasper, and to a geologist as goethite. It can be thought of as a kind of flint that is very rich in iron, and it's the iron that produces the ruddy color. It makes fabulous and durable stone tools. Jasper from this quarry was traded through many parts of the Middle Atlantic region throughout pre-European times.
This site, the James Hatch site, was sealed under soil eroding from nearby hillsides when the land around here was initially cleared in the middle of the 19th century. As a result, it's more or less intact and not much affected by the decades of farming, artifact collecting, and land development that have compromised many other related sites in the area. It's relatively pristine condition means the site can tell us an awful lot about how the nearby quarry was used, who used it, when they used it, where they came from, and where they went when they left. It's also the sort of site that can serve as a sort of Rosetta Stone for the interpretation of other, nearby related sites that are more disturbed and compromised. You just don't run into sites like this very often.
In the next few months, construction will begin on a bike trail and drainage improvement project that will impact part of this site. Before that happens, an archaeological field school conducted by Juniata College in partnership with PennDOT, the FHWA, College Township, DCNR, and Penn State will be recovering some of the information and artifacts from the affected portion of the site. The results will include an extensive amount of artifact, soils, and environmental analysis, an immense collection of artifacts, a substantial technical report on the results, a popular-level publication, local exhibits of recovered artifacts, public lectures and presentations, and most importantly, a window into the day-to-day world of the First Pennsylvanians.
The view from that window is, I think, the most significant result. In my experience, when most folks hear the word "Archaeology", it conjures up images of pyramids, Roman ruins, even Lost Arks. I want to help everyone understand something rarely taught in schools and rarely discussed in the popular press: every place has a past, and every past matters. The past is our only available guide for interpreting and preparing for our future. From buried places as diverse and prosaic as the foundations of slave cabins to French and Indian War forts to small Native American encampments, to the ruins of iron furnaces, the stories of other lives and distant times come back to us. Those stories are by turns instructive, inspiring, sobering, enlightening: we have only to look and listen, and hopefully learn.
A final note. I was involved in some of the identification and evaluation work that located this site. My field director and I named it for my old teacher, mentor and friend Jim Hatch. One of Jim's research interests was this complex of jasper quarries and workshops, and he did some of the first and best research on the subject back in the 70's and 80's. Through Jim I discovered a career, and he also helped me out with a lot of other things as well. If you'd like to know more about him
you might give this a read.
I'll be posting again later this week.
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