![]() "So we're talking about fairly early people with a nomadic life pattern, right on the border of the Paleo and Early Archaic," he said. It's a simple technology preferred by sub-arctic nomadic bands that must travel light. "We think they may be hide tent weights" - stones used by the Indians to hold down the edges of hide tents, Goodwin said. A few feet away from one of the tool-making areas, the digging revealed a line of stones. It all adds up to evidence that the site was used repeatedly by the Indians as a tool-making camp.Īnd there's more. Nearby was a pile of as many as 1,500 stone flakes discarded during tool-making. "It looks like an episode of someone sitting and breaking large stones and taking away what he needed" to make stone blades, said Polglase.Įlsewhere, they found a quartzite "quarry blank" - a melon-sized stone from which chunks for making knife blades and projectile points were chipped. One such feature, at first thought to be a hearth, turned out to contain stone cobbles that were not fire-cracked, and large stone flakes. Only one other Paleo-Indian site is known in Maryland, also in northern Arundel.īut what has excited the scientists most so far are features that hint at the lifestyles and behaviors of these Early Archaic Indians. There are hopes the site may yield still older materials, like the fluted Clovis projectile points characteristic of "Paleo-Indians" - North America's first human residents. This Indian camp - now barely 50 feet above sea level - was an upland retreat high above more substantial camps that were probably located along the ancient Susquehanna River, now submerged beneath Chesapeake Bay. Sea levels were rising as the glaciers melted, but were still 250 to 300 feet lower than today.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |