Leading Archaeology Research there for 50 years. James we are currently 46 kilometers southwest of pittsburgh, pennsylvania in Washington County on the north bank of cross creek, which is a small tributary of the ohio river. In 1972, there was a vacancy in the Anthropology Department at the university of pittsburgh. I joined the faculty there. One of the parameters of which job was to set up an Archaeological Training Program that would train not only graduate and undergraduate students in anthropology and archaeology and the protocols of modern excavation, but also to train people in ancillary fields, geologists, climatologists, floral and fauna specialists and so forth. Because i didnt have the opportunity to search for a location for this field operation, due to research commitments in eastern mediterranean, i circulated word amongst my colleagues who directed me to see this particular site, which had actually been discovered in 1955 by the landowner, albert miller. At that particular juncture in time, we thought we understood everything there was to understand about the initial human occupation of the new world. There was a prevalent model about how that event took place, when that event took place, what their lifestyles may have been like, that literally come literally, everybody believed. And the excavations here and at a series of other locations have profoundly altered our perceptions of the past in such a way that literally, everything we thought we knew, we dont know anymore. Cross creek flows into the ohio river directly west of us, about 12. 22 kilometers from here, a little more than six miles from here. With just a little more water in the stream, you could come new down could canoe along the ohio with little difficulty, with a couple of portage points necessary where you would have to move to pedestrian traffic. Any human populations moving up or down cross creek, to and from the ohio river prehistorically, whether it was euroamericans, whether it was native americans, late in the day would have seen this rock shelter and stopped here for varying periods of time. Sometimes just an overnighter, sometimes for a longer time. What attracted us to the site in 1973 when we saw it was the size of the overhang, the fact that even during periods of heavy rain and snow, you are protected from the elements inside. The fact that even when the creeks flood as it has several times during the course of the excavations, the rock shelter is always high and dry. There are permanent springs that provide Drinking Water both west and east of the site, as well as the prepolluted state of cross creek itself would have provided Drinking Water. There is an abundance of edible wild plant and animal food in the area which is a prime attraction, but the protection from the elements is a big deal. It sort of renders this into a kind of prehistoric holiday in, as it were. And all the native americans at the time, whether they belonged to a group that had stayed here before or not, would have been aware that this site existed. And would have, by wordofmouth, transmitted that information either to their own kinsfolk or other groups would have found out about it or rediscovered it. So essentially, if you are going to spend the evening anywhere between here and the ohio river, or pennsylvania, the little town nearby, this is where you would stop and this is what attracted us to this location. And it is the exact same thing that would have attracted prehistoric people here too. Back when the initial excavation started in 1973, we thought we understood everything there was to know about the first people in the new world. In 1933, there were excavations near a town in new mexico called clovis. And from that particular location which is called a Blackwater Draw locality number three, they recovered a particularly distinctive kind of spear point with two channel flakes or flutes taken from either side, probably to facilitate have to. These points had been known previously. In fact, we have known about their existence for several hundred years. They have been found all over most of unglazed seated north america, on down into new mexico, down into south america. The prevailing wisdom was the people that made these points were in fact the first people in the new world. That they had come over from siberia, walked across the bearing platform at a time when it was exposed, and then basically sprinted from the unglazed seated a bearing all the way down to the tip of south america in less than 500 radiocarbon years, killing off 32 genera of ice age animals on their way. It was thought to have been, by american and canadian archaeologists, the greatest killing event in the history of the planet. Europeans were skeptical from the very beginning. South americans were skeptical because they had material as old as clovis but clearly unrelated to it. In the u. S. And canadian response, as we like to stress, was those guys on the others of the atlantic havent the faintest idea what they are talking about. End those guys in south america dont even speak english. Consequently, we ignored all that data. And in 1973 when we started to work here, none of us believed that the site would be particularly deep in terms of the sediment pile, or particularly old. We were all subscribers as was everybody to the clovis first hypothesis. And according to that, the makers of these points crossed the Bering Straits, about 12 or 14,000 years ago, they were rapidly moving, big game hunters, and they were critical in the extinction process of most of the ice age animals. And between 1933 and the excavations here, more than 500 localities in north and south america were claimed to have been older than clovis. And they would all share a similar trajectory. You would read about them in the local media first or hear about them, then you would find a scientific publication or two about them, and then some fatal flaw would manifest itself. They either had imperfectly decided to find lawyers, they had artifacts that were not of human manufacturers or there were there were some other flaw that rendered them they had 15 minutes of fame and they disappeared. Each time one of these sites was found to be not as old as claimed, it reinforced the clovis model. So that by the time we started work here in june of 1973, the clovis model was so firmly entrenched, that there practically except in south america there was no one who didnt believe it. We started the work here because a local historian had been a friend of albert miller, the property owner, who had discovered the site in 1955 and had been looking ever since for somebody to validate his supposition that native americans had camped here. And we were i was part of the group that validated that proposition, that in fact this had been a campsite, for the reasons we indicated. There are other attractions here. The rock shelter is south facing. So the daily trajectory of the sun, the sandstone which forms the roof and walls of the walk shelter, provide a more equitable microenvironment then it is at the bottom of the creek or at the top. So that, in conjunction with those other attributes, a level floor, a high ceiling, so that the prevailing wind which normally blows there is none today blows from west to east across the mouth of the rock shelter, any fires you ignite in the interior are rapidly and efficiently ventilated, any insect pests that might want to bite on you are usually vacated by the prevailing wind. So there is a variety of things that would have drawn you or me or anyone watching this to stay here, and clearly, that was the case prehistorically. While we believed, for those reasons, that people used the site, we had no idea whatsoever how old it would turn out to be. What we wanted to do here was to make sure that in the process of training students, the very latest technologies, the very most highresolution technologies of which i or any of the staff were aware were used here, it was always meant to be a methodological Tour De Force more than a place whose discoveries were paramount. In other words, how you got the data was more critical to us than whatever we found. At least at the beginning. Later on as it turned out, as the site proved to be both older and deeper, we recovered indications that we never imagined would be here that caused an enormous controversy at the time, and only when other sites like this or even older than this were discovered in various parts of the world, was it clear that the clovis first proposition was an error. When columbus originally got here in 1492, before he was the admiral of the ocean sea, so to speak, he encountered aboriginals on semantic a or wherever he landed. And they were the tyee no and he or members of his entourage posed a series of questions about these folk that we have been asking ever since. Who are they . Where did they come from . Via what routes did they employ to get here . And when did they arrive . And a question they didnt ask but which we obviously have addressed here is, what were they doing . What were their lifestyles like . He thought he knew the answers to all of his own questions because he thought he was in the east, not the west indies. So he called them indios, or indians, a term we have used ever since. The supposition was at least within 100 years, but they had arrived here, 2500 years before he did. And that benchmark arrival date has been pushed further and further and further back through the years but it would take a series of intellectual developments in western europe before we could actually answer any of those questions appropriately. The rock shelter has changed dramatically through time, both in terms of its scale or size. The overhang once went clear out to where you see those lights. And now it is located way back in the vicinity of that rock fall event. So in the last 15,000 years, the roof has been steadily retreating to the north. The sediment pile you see here has accumulated in a number of ways. The most common of which, when these big roof all blocks on the west end eastern edge of the site were in place, was by the grain by grain erosion of sand particles from the roof and walls of the rock shelter, which was a slow and very steady process. That a grain by grain erosion would be punctuated at various points in the past by the detachment of roof blocks. First fist sized and then print up and then progressively larger until one of these big blocks came off and on the whole process would repeat itself again, so that never in any two successive years did this site look exactly the same as it did the year before. We would learn that later on in the course of the excavation. We began a trench out here where we are standing outside the drip line which proceeded from south to north. The purpose of which was to explore the deposits, the sediments, the layers, that have been least disturbed by human activity first before going into the interior where the principal dwelling area would have been, the principal activity area, where the disturbance conceivably would have been much more extensive than out here. So we plumbed these deposits first, moved to the north toward the wall of the rock shelter, then subsequently expanded to the east and west. Again, the kinds of things we were able to do here in many instances had never, ever been done before on the planet. Contrary to most archaeological sites, this enterprise from the very beginning, was very heavily funded. We had money from the Meadowcroft Foundation from the university of pittsburgh and a bunch of pittsburgh based corporations. We always had more than ample money. Since you could torture students way more in those days way more than you could now, labor was never an issue because we mandated four years of field school and the duration of the project was such that it usually would begin in may or june and run until september. 12 hours a day, six days a week. And so with a captive audience and all the money in the world, so to speak, we were free to explore issues here, in particular ways that had never been done before. One of those involved, the construction of a series of buildings of which the one we are in now is only the most recent. That prehistorically, or historically, looked like that portion of the one building that is still adhering to that rock fall event. It let as a dig basically indoors. Where we could control not only the temperature and the ventilation, but we could control the hue, intensity and chrome of the lighting system so that the excavators could maximize their ability optically, and then by a series of other attributes, to distinguish one layer from another. Probably, at least you or some of your viewing audience, have eaten multilevel desserts. And consisting of lawyers of cake or icing or nuts or whatever. And the tags you see here are marking foundries between lawyers. They are basically pneumonic devices so that if you are perverse enough to want to know whether or not you were eating the nut layer in your dessert, you might markets boundary. That is where all these tat what all these tags are for. They marked boundaries between stratigraphic levels, of which there are 11 at this site. The deepest level, stratus one, is the birmingham shale, which is a much softer rock than the sandstone which makes up the bulk of this particular phenomenon. The most recent level 11, is the stratum that you see there, gradually slanting down toward the creek, minus, of course, the vegetation that it would have grown upon it and minus the remanence of that living tree, the stump of which you can see over there. So that is the original 1973 Ground Surface. The surface you see down here represents a much earlier Ground Surface of the site. It is about 13,500 years old. All of that sediment has accumulated since 13,500 years ago. When we got down to that area where you can see a step, we were essentially at a time frame that would have been equivalent to clovis. We decided to remove the rocks from there, not because we expected to find earlier material because none of us did, but we wanted to get to the birmingham shale to understand the geology of the site. And as soon as those rocks were peeled off and we began to find earlier material, we began to appreciate that the site may be far older than we imagined, and might have represented a very different kind of lifestyle than what the current wisdom was in 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978. Specifically we can demonstrate man with fear at about 14,000 bc. That relates to the whole problem of the people in the new world, because clearly, if he is down here in southwestern pennsylvania by 14,000, he must have come across the Bering Strait land bridge, perhaps as early as 25,000 or 30,000 years ago. And so, during the course of the excavations here, signs of a human presence took many forms. There were obviously artifacts of indisputable human manufacturer made of various kinds of raw materials, usually highgrade shirts or flints as they are popularly called. Or jasper from a wide array of quarries. Some of this raw material came from flint ridge in ohio, some of it came from the owner dog outcrops in new york, some of it came from the pennsylvania jasper quarries in eastern pennsylvania. In any case, we dont think that the populations that were using stone from these farflung areas were in fact visiting all those places and that their territory would have been thousands of square miles. Instead, we think they are exchanging it along with other things back and forth with other groups that live in a widely distributed situation like that. Of course, because the site is relatively wet, the most durable items that are recovered from here are usually made of stone like they are at most archaeological sites. It is worth stressing that when you only get stone or ceramics later in time, you are only getting about 5 or less of what they actually made or used. When a site has very is very, very dry like some of the caves in the west and elsewhere, you get a full representation of what these hunter and gatherers made and used, in the form of plant fiber objects, bone, wood objects, which are far more prominent than stone. Nonetheless, here, we only have a hint of those nondurable technologies. We have some burn basketry, we have some bits and pieces of cordage, we have some bone and wooden artifacts, to give you an idea of what the other side of the technology looked like. Most of the stuff from here in the way of artifacts is in fact stone. And most of it was used either in the procurement transfer or transit or preparation for consumption of wild plant and animal foods. However, unlike the clovis model, it is clear that the earliest people that came to this site where in fact what we call rod spectrum broadspectrum subsistence folk. In other words, the guys would eat anything in their refrigerator. They were eating elk to mouse sized animals. They are eating an incredible assortment of plants. We have 1. 4 million plant remains from here. 956,000 animal bones representing over 105 different species. And they are clearly doing things here all the way through time, all the way up to a. D. 1775, which is within striking distance of the Miller Family taking possession of this property as a virginia landgrant. So there is a juncture here between history and prehistory that is very real. In fact, one of the very first things we encountered when we started excavating here was a large stone line historic fire pit at the very top of which were aluminum fliptop beer cans. As you work your way down in this pit, you encountered a progressively greater depth, beer cans without fliptop scum a steel beer bottles, early beer bottles, and at the bottom, glass that had been flaked by native americans into tools. So the juncture of history and prehistory is very vivid here. And all of the stages of prehistory that are represented in Eastern North America are known from here. Beginning with of paleo indian witches whenever people first got to the new world up to about 10,500 years ago. And during which time, the environment was rather different than it is presently. Not dramatically so, but different enough that you would notice. And ice age animals were still around. And then about 10,500 years ago, most of them go extinct. Not due to human predation in many instances, but because of the stresses of environmental change. And you start a very long archaic. There is a peculiarity to the english language and all the indoeuropean languages. We like to divide things into threes. There is an early, middle, and a late archaic. And if you are particularly a, there is an earlier, later early, and so far and so on and so forth. During the archaic, you have native americans gradually increasing in numbers in this area. Late in the archaic, they will be settling for several months at a time at the various open sites in the area. Throughout the sequence of the archaic and paleo indian, the popul