When they first detected traces of an 800-year-old wigwam on a bluff over the Patuxent River last year, archaeologists celebrated what they said was the oldest human structure yet found in Maryland.
Now, deeper excavation at the site — the front lawn of a modest rental house — is yielding details of much earlier settlement, extending its history back to at least 3,000 years ago.
"As far as I know, it's older than anything in Maryland, Virginia and Delaware, perhaps the oldest structures in the Chesapeake region," said Ann Arundel County archaeologist Al Luckenbach, leader of the dig.
And that's just the age that's been established by carbon 14 dating. Slicing deeper in the sandy bluff overlooking the Patuxent's broad marsh, Luckenbach's crew has found stone tools suggesting humans were exploiting the river's abundance as long as 10,000 years ago.
Called Pig Point, the site is producing a gusher of ancient artifacts — decorated pottery, tools crafted from stone and bone, ornaments and food waste that have begun to fill in the details of life along the Patuxent River centuries before Europeans arrived.
"Some of the ceramics that have come out of this site are really just astounding," said Maureen Kavanagh, chief archaeologist at the Maryland Historical Trust and a specialist in ceramics.
There have been pot fragments with incised angular decorations or rims crimped like a pie crust — both different from any ever found in Maryland. Diggers found an intact paint pot the size of a child's fist, and a miniature, decorated pot the size of a thimble.
"These really have us scrambling to figure out what they represent," Kavanaugh said. "Some of these artifacts are one of a kind, and we don't have an easy way of fitting them into our mental template … It's a great, great site."
Archaeologists say some of their discoveries are so exotic in this region, they suggest Pig Point was a center of trade among native people as far-flung as Ohio, Michigan and New York.
Even today, the town site overlooks broad expanses of wild rice and Tuckahoe — river plants that would have helped to feed the native people. Geese, heron, osprey, bald eagles still patrol the shores. Tiny fish roil the shallows.
Trash middens unearthed in the dig are yielding the remains of freshwater mussels, oysters, fish, beaver, muskrat, otter, deer, duck, nuts and more. Archaeologists have also found carbonized corn kernels, evidence of agriculture.
"It's one of the biggest marshes on the East Coast. You couldn't have starved here if you tried," Luckenbach said
Trained in prehistoric archaeology, but best known for leading excavations of Anne Arundel County's colonial-era "Lost Towns," Luckenbach said Pig Point has changed the arc of his long career as the county's chief archaeologist.
"I've been waiting 20 years for the right Indian site," he said. "And here we are at Pig Point."
Work at the site began in April 2009, after the owner, William Brown, contacted the county archaeology office about the artifacts he'd been finding. The dig began soon after in the front yard of a rental home on the property.
"This has made me very happy," Brown said of the dig, which he has joined as a volunteer. "It's my opportunity to learn about the people who lived here before us. I'm fortunate I have the time to be here with them, and through every step of it."
Funded this year by Anne Arundel County and a $32,000 grant from the Maryland Historical Trust, the work at Pig Point has astonished Chesapeake archaeologists, who rave about the fine preservation of artifacts and deep layering of the soil.
"Archaeologists just live for these nice, layer-cake sites where the oldest [artifacts] are the most deeply buried, until you get to the modern stuff on top," said Richard J. Dent, professor of anthropology at American University in Washington.
Chesapeake archaeologists more typically encounter artifacts in shallow soil profiles, disturbed at the surface by plows. Some trenches at Pig Point have gone seven feet down without running out of artifacts.
"In fact, in this area I can only point to one site like that in 35 years," Dent said. That was on the Monocacy River, where flooding tends to build up deep layers of soil. At Pig Point, Luckenbach suspects it was wind-blown soil and erosion from higher on the bluff that continually buried older layers over thousands of years.
The project made news last year when his team of a dozen or so professionals and volunteers revealed an oval pattern of "post molds" — dark, round patches in the soil where wooden posts had once been driven into the dirt, then rotted away.
The oval pattern — 16 feet by 12 feet — was all that remained of an Indian wigwam, made from saplings inserted in the soil and bent together to form a house frame. The frame would have been covered by poplar bark or woven mats. William Brown has built a replica on the property that is sturdy enough for an adult to climb.
Carbon 14 dating pegged the post molds to the 12 the century A.D. But "as we continued to dig down," Luckenbach said, "we found more wigwams with good carbon 14 dates." One by one they appeared, each one a bit deeper than the earlier one, some of them overlapping. The dates came back at A.D. 520, and A.D. 210.
"Below that, the charcoal did not survive to get carbon 14 dates," Luckenbach said. But even as his crew dug deeper into the soil — and further back in time — "the wigwams did not stop."
The ovals kept turning up, even beyond a layer where pottery disappears — a time about 3,000 years ago, before ceramic technology came to the area. Luckenbach believes those are the oldest in the Chesapeake region.
Dent agrees. He said there have been reports of traces of structures as old as 11,000 years old in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, "but a lot of people don't accept them," he said, because they didn't see them.
"The great thing about Al is that he has been very open about inviting [archaeologists] to the site and letting them excavate. The fact that so many people have seen those things makes them better accepted," said Dent. He, too, was drawn to the site by reports of Luckenbach's extraordinary finds.
Among these is a stone projectile point. The flint was traced to a formation in Ohio, and it was fashioned in a style typical of the mound-building Hopewell tradition that flourished between 200 BC and AD 500 in from West Virginia to southern Indiana. The Hopewell people were known, among other things, for their far-flung exchange routes.
Luckenbach said obsidian tools found at Hopewell sites in the Midwest have been traced to deposits in Wyoming. He speculates that the flint found at Pig Point was left there by Hopewell people who came over the Appalachians and down the Potomac on quests for highly prized fossil shark's teeth from the Chesapeake, and tiny marginella shells from ocean beaches. Both have also been found at Pig Point.
Dent isn't so sure. "I rather suspect people from here were going that way … and bringing stuff back," he said. Perhaps the mound-builders held some sort of religious attraction for more distant people. "I wonder if some people from this region weren't going west to get the message, and bringing the message back with them," perhaps with some souvenirs.
Other items include a rolled copper bead from Michigan and green jasper from New York.
The finds demonstrate that Pig Point people were in contact with other trade centers at some distance, and their town was itself a semi-permanent base camp and trade center, like others found along rivers in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
"We tend to think of these people in the past were relatively isolated little groups," Dent said. "But I suspect they were more like us than we thought. They didn't have a global economy, but they had an economy that looked beyond the doorsteps of their house."
Source: The Baltimore Sun