Humans hunkered at Meadowcroft in Pennsylvania from Ice Age to Space Age

Source: dallasnews.com
BETSA MARSH/Special Contributor


Photo credit: BETSA MARSH

AVELLA, Pa. – Beer cans crumpled around a dead campfire, signs of late-night partying scorched into the sandstone. In a cutaway 15 feet below the modern fire circle, there's more charred stone, flecked with the shells of Ohio River mussels and the bones of passenger pigeons, both long extinct.

Serious archaeological study began at Meadowcroft rock shelter in 1973. The tags in the stone mark geologic strata. In between the two fire rings? The oldest known site of human habitation in North America, at least 16,000 years old.That's the surprise of Pennsylvania's Meadowcroft rock shelter, an inviting sandstone overhang in a tributary valley of the Ohio River that's been welcoming fishers, hunters and travelers since the Paleo-Indians. The site in Avella, 30 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, is now a National Historic Landmark, set amid towering sycamore and pawpaw trees. Its 52 carbon dates, in almost perfect stratigraphic order, reflect a continuous human record for 16,000-plus years.

"It was like a Paleo motel," guide Eleanor Crowe said. "People would come along Cross Creek, seven miles from the Ohio River, and stay here, from the earliest Paleo-Indians to the time of European settlement."

Closed in 2007, the landmark has reopened with a new shelter of its own, a $2.3 million enclosure that's bolted into the bedrock. A new roof protects the archaeological dig, and new platforms allow more visitors to see the excavated levels and start piecing the timeline together for themselves.

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