Avella, Pennsylvania
Journal Entry
September 20, 2014
When driving through the deeply green, lush, modern forest that characterizes western Pennsylvania, it is almost impossible to imagine the ancient alien world of Ice Age America. That world was characterized by mile-high fields of glacial ice whose margins were home to an astonishing menagerie of animals. There were enormous, furry elephants with 15-foot long tusks, ground sloths the size of elephants, saber-toothed cats with arching canine teeth more than a foot in length, and bison 50 percent larger than the already gigantically scaled American buffalo. When you look into the enormous alcove today called the Meadowcroft Rockshelter, you are looking at the living space of a group of human beings who called that alien world home. Meadowcroft is our most distant destination in time.
What You Will See
The site is part of the Meadowcroft Rockshelter and Historic Village, which is run by the Senator John Heinz History Center. Every time you have used Heinz ketchup on your burger and fries, you’ve helped fund the preservation of this site. Pour it on! Along with a small village of historic buildings (you can watch a blacksmith forging iron tools) and a re-creation of a sixteenth-century Indian community—when we were there, you could try your hand at throwing a spear at a model of a deer—there is the rockshelter.
Excavation of the rockshelter (it’s more of an alcove in the rock than a true cave) was directed by archaeologist Dr. James Adovasio and is one of the most meticulously investigated sites in North America. Realizing the importance of this site in the study of the earliest human settlement of the New World, the excavation itself has been preserved. You can still see the dig units and stratigraphic profiles exposed by the excavators, each level still bearing its identification tag (Figure 16). Realizing early on the great potential significance of this site, the archaeologists kept extremely accurate track of where and in which layer each recovered artifact was found. By recovering organic material in each of those layers and then applying radiocarbon dating, an age could be assigned to each artifact. The oldest layer has been firmly dated to more than 13,000 years ago, and some of the oldest artifacts found at the site may be as much as 16,000 years old.
Visiting Meadowcroft is like visiting an active archaeological site. You can almost imagine that the archaeologists have taken a lunch break and will return any minute to continue their excavation. It’s also like visiting a crime scene where criminologists have left their investigation in place. Adovasio and his crew were investigating not the scene of a crime but the scene of a life, one lived as much as 16,000 years ago. It’s a remarkable place. When you visit, imagine those first Americans huddled under the roof of the shelter, creating a life in this new world as an enormous glacier covered the landscape mere miles to the north.
Why Is Meadowcroft Rockshelter Important?
Who first settled the New World? Where did those settlers came from? How did they get here? And when did they first arrive? These have long been key questions posed by scholars hoping to understand the origin and source of the native peoples of the Americas.
As long ago at the early 1600s, a Spanish missionary, José Acosta, shrewdly proposed that American Indians could have walked into the New World from northeast Asia across a land connection of some kind. Using the Bible as his guide, he maintained that since the animals of North and South America must be descendants of those saved on board Noah’s Ark, and since the only way those animals could have reached the New World from the landing place of the Ark was by walking, there must be a land connection from the Old World to the New. Human beings, Acosta suggested, would have taken that same route to the New World. Since European explorers had not discovered a connection anywhere else, Acosta proposed that it must exist in the far north, on the west side of the new continent. And he was right.
Of course it would be convenient if we found the oldest human settlements in the New World close to that northwest entry point in Alaska and the Canadian Yukon, with sites progressively more recent as we moved away from that place, but that has not happened. In fact, most of the oldest sites in the New World have been found far from Alaska, in Texas (the Debra L. Friedkin site), Pennsylvania (Meadow-croft), and even Chile (Monte Verde) in South America.
Meadowcroft is an enormously significant site, a high-resolution, tightly focused snapshot of life among the earliest human settlers of the New World. The material remains at the site represent a window into America’s ancient past; it shows us, for example, the nature of the stone tool technology of these early settlers and provides information about their subsistence in an inhospitable environment. For that reason alone, it’s a worthwhile stop on your journey through time. The preserved excavation and the shelter constructed around the entrance are quite impressive as well. It is also important to remember that these most ancient inhabitants of western Pennsylvania are the descendants of people more ancient still, whose trail back to their entry point via the Bering Land Bridge likely still presents us with archaeological evidence, not yet discovered, of the spread of human beings through the New World. The archaeological story of those truly “first Americans” remains to be found.
Site Type: First Peoples
Wow Factor: *** The wow factor here is based not so much on what the place looks like but on its significance.
Museum: There is a nice museum on-site. On occasion, the director of archaeology at Meadowcroft, Dr. James Adovasio, provides a tour of the site and lectures about his research. Check the website (below) for the schedule of his presentations.
Ease of Road Access: *****
Ease of Hike: **** It’s really not a difficult hike, but you do have to climb a bunch of steps.
Natural Beauty of Surroundings: *** The area is wooded and quite pretty.
Kid Friendly: **** The rockshelter itself is interesting, but kids will greatly enjoy the replica Indian village. When we were there, kids could use an atlatl to throw spears at a model of a deer.
Food: Bring your own.
How to Get There: It’s about an hour southwest of Pittsburgh; 401 Meadowcroft Rd., Avella, Pennsylvania.
Hours of Operation: Saturday noon to 5 p.m.; Sunday 1 to 5 p.m.
Cost: See website.
Best Season to Visit: It can be very cold and snowy in winter in western Pennsylvania. Any other season might be a better bet.
Website: www.heinzhistorycenter.org/exhibits/meadowcroft-rockshelter
Designation: National Historic Landmark