It is late July in a former potato field next to a swamp in northwestern Pennsylvania, southern Crawford County. You are on your knees, sweating, digging, really getting your hands dirty.
But you are not digging for potatoes. There are no mosquitoes under the hot sun today, thank God, but there may have been 12,000 years ago when the local residents were here hunting, beside a lake. The lake is now gone, having been replaced by a large swamp that is an arm of the Conneaut Outlet, and without doubt the vegetation looks very different in the summer of 2010 than it did all those thousands of years ago.
Modern Crawford County residents hunt here for the white-tailed deer and waterfowl, mostly, with some pheasant, turkey and rabbit harvesting as well. But the earlier occupants of this territory were out for more varied and some bigger game: mastodons and mammoths, caribou, bear and others.
Mastodons and mammoths were large, colder-climate-adapted elephants that lived in this area during the close of the last Ice Age, around 11,000 to 15,000 years ago. They roam our county no longer, and there are several theories about what made them extinct. Some think that climate change, as the glaciers that once covered this area retreated northward, their food sources were destroyed by vegetational changes, killed them off; shifts, and variations as the forests evolved from coniferous to deciduous forms, pushed the large prey out of modern history.
And, since there have been some discoveries in North America that these “mega fauna” had been hunted and butchered by humans at that time, others believe that hunting, possibly to extinction, by our distant ancestors provided a key factor for this loss.
There is undeniable evidence that people, mastodons and mammoths all occupied this area around the same time. A graduate student at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, Gerald Lang, is testing this late Pleistocene site in hope to determine these people’s life ways, through careful archaeological investigation, and document evidence that these peoples were hunting mammoths and/or mastodons.
There have been such finds in New York, Ohio and Michigan, as well as in nearby Erie County, showing evidence of the butchering of this mega fauna. This summer was the second season of fieldwork at this particular archaeological site, with some older components around 12,000 years old, right here in Crawford County. So far the older evidence of Paleo-Indian age materials are surface finds, but material of late Paleo/Early Archaic time has been recovered and documented, as well as some more recent Native American archaeological material.
Located in an old potato field on private property, the exact location of which must remain confidential in order to preserve the site, several prehistoric features and many artifacts have been found, indicating that these very ancient people utilized the site for hunting and camping. Geological investigation, in the form of core samples and remote sensing, lifted out of the ground indicating the presence of different layers of soil, shed light on former environments on this site over the ages. A beach was found on the edge of this lake-turned-swamp, and preliminary speculation is that the people who had a camp here may have had watercraft, such as canoes, and that their small settlement may have been a hunting camp.
This study of these very ancient Native Americans and their activities in our area is, however, only a small part of the rich archaeological record in Crawford County.
A disciplined science
Unlike popular perceptions about archaeology, like all that archaeologists do is run around digging up treasures and being chased by the people whom they have stolen the treasures from, a la Indiana Jones, archaeology is a disciplined science.
Professional archaeologists are careful and highly skilled scientists with years of professional training, and their schooling never ends. Their search for evidence of human behavior in the distant past doesn’t merely mean grabbing a shovel and starting to dig. According to Marilyn Kerns, a contract archaeologist who lives in western Crawford County, any project has three distinct phases.
“First,” Kerns said, “you need to conduct a careful investigation. This means studying the literature for previous finds in the area, comparing historical data with the present site, and learning as much background as you can.”
“Second,” she continued, “you must determine the size and scope of the project, gathering resources to put your plan into action. Only then do you begin the real ‘work’ of data collection, digging and analyzing your finds. This third phase may take 20 years or more.”
Another local archaeologist, who has had much training and experience over the past 40 years, is Dick Cunningham, retired career Navy man.
“What I have a problem with are these so-called ‘professional’ people who don’t really care about the science or even about preserving the past,” Cunningham said. “There are very strict laws about any construction project on government land, either federal or local, or that uses government funding. They must conduct an archaeological survey to make certain that no important site gets destroyed before they can even begin to build. Of course their priority is to get the job done as quickly as they can. If an archaeological site is present, a delay while it is being investigated costs them money and raises the cost of their project.”
This, according to Kerns (whose Iroquois Native American heritage is important to her), means that some will do anything to save money.
“These companies hire one of these so-called ‘professional guys,’ ” she said, “who don’t really give a damn about anything except how much money they can make. They write up reports that comply with the law, but they don’t care at all about the data that they could collect, or what will be lost.” Kerns can tell many stories about how she was completely ignored, and her reports going unread by companies in a hurry to finish their work and move on.
“And then there are the ‘midnight bulldozers’ that some companies use,” Cunningham said. “A site will be found in the way of a construction project, and one morning you arrive, and the whole place has been scraped bare in the middle of the night, and everything is lost. No one will accept responsibility, the company pays a mere $10,000 fine, and the project is completed with no delays.” Lang, the grad student working on the site from Edinboro University, adds that “This clandestine destruction often results in loss of significant data important to the cultural heritage and knowledge of an area, sometimes resulting in a loss of national importance.”
Consensus among archaeologists and historians is that this is not only illegal, but highly immoral as well.
Veteran ‘diggers’
Ray Stewart, a long-time Cochranton resident whose avocation has always been archaeology, has worked on many local sites. The most important, he feels, is the McFate site.
“In the 1930s, Roosevelt had a program where the government provided jobs for archaeologists,” Stewart said. “There was a site near Cochranton that was chosen for investigation, and an archaeologist named Harry L. Schoff came in and began to excavate. It was on a farm owned by a Percy McFate, thus the name ‘McFate Site.’
“Schoff found several late woodlands era villages, and kept careful records, but he never published them,” Stewart said. “But if you really want to know about archaeology in general and local pre-historic cultures in this part of the world, you need to speak with Carl Burkett.”
Burkett, a Conneaut Lake resident, has been an archaeologist for many of his 71 years. A University of Pittsburgh alum who did graduate work at Yale University, Burkett has been closely involved with the McFate site. In the spring 1997 issue of Pennsylvania Archaeologist, a scholarly journal published by the Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology, Burkett and Cunningham finally published a paper that notated the study that had been going on at the McFate site during and after Schoff’s 1938 investigation.
“The most striking evidence that there had been a thriving community in the French Creek Valley was the very large open area, like a prairie or a meadow, that stretched from Wilson Shutes all the way up to north of present day Meadville,” Burkett said. “This open area was obviously a man-made feature, although the local indigenous peoples living there denied that they had cleared it. George Washington noted this meadow when he came through the area in 1753. Later, soil samples showed that it had been made by native peoples beginning 2,000 years ago, and that there had been some agriculture here of corn (maize), squash and beans. Clearing the forest vegetation also attracted other wildlife that these people hunted, such as deer.”
The simmering hot potato field where there may have been hunting of the now extinct mammoths and mastodons predated the French Creek Valley prairie by 10,000 years, however. These sites carry the designation of “paleo,” as in paleontology, or “paleo peoples,” and means “very ancient” or “prehistoric.” Technically, the McFate peoples were prehistoric, meaning that they came before people kept historic records as we modern folks are accustomed to. But these hunting folk predate McFate sites more than five times longer than Jesus predates us. This means that they are truly very ancient.
Will we learn a lot about the people who lived here shortly after the great glaciers retreated?
If Gerry Lang and others working at the site are able to continue their slow and painstaking work, the answer is “most certainly!”
Author: David Coy | Source: The Meadville Tribune [September 27, 2010]