WASHINGTON COUNTY, Pa. — History in America stretches far beyond 1776. In Washington County, there’s a site where researchers say people were living 19,000 years before the founding of the United States.
A massive stone overhang at the historic Meadowcroft Rockshelter offers a history lesson unlike anything you’ll get in a textbook or anywhere else in the country.
“For the last 7,000 years of the Ice Age, this site was being used by these prehistoric Paleo-Indians,” David Scofield explained, the director of Meadowcroft Rockshelter and Historic Village.
This archaeological site outside of Pittsburgh offers historians an extremely rare glimpse into life thousands and thousands of years ago.
"It’s a National Historic Landmark that has provided some of the oldest evidence of human habitation in North America. People were camping at this spot 19,000 years ago," Scofield said.
Scofield gave Channel 11 a tour of the site that has been excavated by teams of archaeologists and University of Pittsburgh students since 1970. Some even camped at the site during their summer digs.
Visitors can still see a patch of darkened rock inside the shelter. Archaeologists believe it’s the remains of an ice age fire pit.
Long before the site became a famous archaeological discovery, Scofield says local teens gathered here to drink beer and build fires of their own, unaware that researchers would soon dig up more than 20,000 prehistoric artifacts.
“The signature artifact is what we call the Miller Lanceolate Point,” Scofield said. “It’s a 14,000-year-old spear point named after Albert Miller, who discovered the site.”
Miller, whose family had owned the farm since 1795, began digging here in 1955 after a groundhog unearthed several artifacts on the property. That search led to the discovery of the famous spear point.
Archaeologists say Paleo-Indians traveling along Cross Creek would have spotted this rock overhang and recognized it as a great place to seek shelter.
“That was the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. You couldn’t stay in one place year-round. You had to follow the food, or you die,” Scofield said.
In addition to the artifacts, more than 950,000 animal remains and 1.4 million plant remains were recovered at the site, giving researchers some of the best evidence of what people were eating, how they were living and what the environment was like thousands of years ago.
And while so much has changed, Scofield says some threads of humanity remain the same.
“People are people no matter when they lived,” he said. “They just had a different toolkit. They were not dumb people by any means. They were smart people who learned how to thrive in difficult circumstances.”
Meadowcroft is part of the Heinz History Center, which includes a museum housing artifacts they discovered at the site. You can check it out for yourself, but this is also still an active archaeological site with plans to dig again in the near future.
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