WASHINGTON COUNTY, Pa. — History in America stretches back 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.
It is the historic “Meadowcroft Rockshelter.”
This massive stone overhang 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 prehistoric Paleo-Indians.
The archaeological site offers historians an extremely rare glimpse into life thousands and thousands of years ago.
David Scofield is the rockshelter’s director.
“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.
He said that the site has been excavated by teams of archaeologists and University of Pittsburgh students since the 1970s.
Some people even camp there during 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 said “local teens would gather there 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. it’s a 14,000-year-old spear point named after Albert Miller, who discovered the site,” Scofield said.
Albert Miller, whose family had owned the farm since 1795, began digging there 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 the 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.
In addition to the artifacts, more than 950,000 animal remains and 1.4 million plant remains were recovered here, 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.
While so much has changed, David says some threads of humanity remain the same.
“People are people no matter when they lived. 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,” Scofield said.
Meadowcroft is part of the Heinz History Center, which includes a museum housing artifacts they discovered there. You can check it out for yourself, but the site is still an active archaeological site with plans to dig again in the near future.
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