Today (September 16, 2023) several students from Shippensburg University’s history department travelled with Dr. John Bloom and me to the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter, an American Indian site in eastern Pennsylvania.
The first slides you see come from the sandstone overhang that made a natural roof for the Meadowcroft encampment, as well as the main area of the archaeological dig that took place in the 1970s to unearth the pre-historic human settlement there.
Meadowcroft is a unique site, with evidence of continuous human occupation dating to about 19,000 years ago. It supplies key evidence responsible for the re-dating of American Indians’ existence thousands of years earlier than was previously thought. The shelter only had room for maybe a dozen people, and was occupied only seasonally.
The evidence of plant life particularly interested me: acorns, walnuts, and especially hackberry seeds were among the most important. Since these ripened through the late fall, dwellers would have experienced a lot of cold weather, despite the southward facing rock that kept the area a bit warmer. The cold might explain the fact that fingertips and toes were the most unearthed body parts (along with teeth) by the archaeologists — they were frostbite remains.
The other slides relate to the recreated Monongahela village near Meadowcroft. These were much later peoples who existed up until the 1630s CE. By this time agriculture had long been introduced (corn came to the area by about 1000 CE), but coexisted with foraging. Students tried out wooden spears weighted with an atlatl used by the Monongahela, and examined a re-created wigwam.
Moreover, I saw an adorable fawn.
