Category: Native American (Page 4 of 4)

This photograph shows four students clearing dirt from an archaeological site. — Students excavate the Hatch site in Centre County, PA.

Centre County’s Hatch Site

November 22, 2017 / Steven McDougal / 3 Comments

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

Feature 1 found in Test Area III contained a pestle and a cup stone (or “nutting stone”) found undisturbed for thousands of years. These artifacts, together with analyses of the soils that were retained from the feature, seem to confirm that nut processing activities took place at the site. Credit: Allegheny Archaeology Research, September 2015.

McKean County’s Keating Site, Part 2

May 24, 2017 / Guest Contributor / 0 Comments

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!

McKean County’s Keating Site, Part 1

April 5, 2017 / Guest Contributor / 3 Comments

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

Seneca Assisting in the Metal Detector Survey of Alternative 1. Photograph by Chris Espenshade (formerly of Commonwealth Heritage Group), 2015.

Into the Wilderness: Part 3

November 23, 2016 / Keith Heinrich / 0 Comments

The search for Thompson’s Island ends… and a new search begins… Continue reading

Gallery page of the Digging I95 website, http://diggingi95.com/tag/gallery/

Artifacts from PennDOT Dig Shine at Wheaton

October 19, 2016 / Guest Contributor / 0 Comments

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.

Some of the artifacts uncovered during the excavation included bone pendants, fish hook and a notched spoon.

What is your most amazing discovery?

December 30, 2015 / Guest Contributor / 0 Comments

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.