Blog of the Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office

Author: Justin McKeel

The Pennsylvania Statewide Pre-Contact Predictive Model Revisited

As of September 2026, we have over 28,500 archaeological sites recorded in Pennsylvania. This reflects nearly 100 years of Pennsylvanian’s appreciating and recording information on the archaeological evidence of past populations. Of those sites, over 21,900 are pre-contact period archaeological sites – sites that date to the thousands of years that people lived in what is now Pennsylvania before Europeans arrived.

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The Archaeology of a Village Blacksmith Shop

In 1823, a blacksmith named John W. Miller moved into what is now southeastern Blair County with his wife, Mary, and their three-year-old son, James. In their first years there they built their house and a small blacksmith shop along an existing road between Bedford and Rebecca Furnace. They didn’t have neighbors in those early years, but that wouldn’t last long.

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