Blog of the Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office
Picture yourself – lounging poolside, lakeside, or on the beach – with your tablet or smart phone (or even good old-fashioned paper) enjoying the hottest summer publication that hasn’t yet made the New York Times bestseller list: #preservationhappenshere, Pennsylvania’s next statewide historic preservation plan. Continue reading
Archaeologists are always on the ready for the next mythical idea of what we are and what we do. We don’t dig dinosaurs or find buried treasure (at least the kind that entails riches untold). We don’t all work in academia and, yes, our parents likely told us there were no jobs in archaeology.
This past summer I had the opportunity, along with other members of the PA SHPO, to visit an archaeological field school underway in State College. It’s not often I get away from my desk, so it was a nice chance to get out in the field and get my hands dirty helping to screen soil, even if just for a day or two. The field school was run as a coordinated effort by the Juniata College Cultural Resource Institute and the PennDOT Highway Archaeological Survey Team (PHAST) at the James W. Hatch Site (36Ce544). Continue reading
Last month, we introduced you to the Keating Site (36MC0127) located along the Potato Creek north of Smethport in McKean County, Pennsylvania in this interesting blog post. Read on to learn about more cool finds at this prehistoric site!
Located along the Potato Creek north of Smethport in McKean County, Pennsylvania, the Keating site (36MC0127) is a prehistoric site with a long history of occupation covering a period of time from approximately 7000 B.C. to A.D. 1500. The site is eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places important because of its potential to provide more information about how people lived in this area during the Early Archaic to Late Woodland. This post, the first of two, explores some of the more interesting findings from this dig. Continue reading
The search for Thompson’s Island ends… and a new search begins… Continue reading
There’s a scene in the 1960 classic, The Time Machine, where Rod Taylor escapes the imminent nuclear war by throwing his machine fast into the future. Quickly, the ground rises all around him and for what appears to be an eternity, he is sitting there isolated from the outside world. At that moment, as we watch him shivering, we wonder with him what is going on above ground. An archaeologist would empathize with Rod Taylor at that moment, not because he has put himself into a tight spot, but because Taylor’s experience is the experience of all artifacts in the ground. They are part of the world, then they are no longer part of the world, having disappeared beneath the earth.
by Christine Davis, Christine Davis Consultants, Inc.
After 30 years of excavating archaeological sites in Pennsylvania, I’m often asked about my most amazing discovery. I would not hesitate for a moment to say it was our large-scale excavation of the Freeport Site in Freeport Township, Greene County, which revealed an extraordinary Native American archaeological site dispersed across 11 acres of land above the Monongahela River.
© 2024 Pennsylvania Historic Preservation
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
Recent Comments