For 50 years, Meadowcroft has revealed details on early American inhabitants
Punxsutawney Phil may be the most consequential groundhog in Pennsylvania history, but the second-most consequential could be an anonymous critter who was rooting around on Albert Miller’s farm outside Avella in the fall of 1955.
That groundhog dug out what looked to be a prehistoric tool, and Miller decided a little more digging was in order. The ground yielded up what looked to be an intact flint knife, flint flakes and burnt bone. To Miller, it was a eureka moment of the first order – he had long suspected that native people had inhabited the area thousands of years before, and the artifacts provided evidence to back up his point.
Rather than beat the drum about his discovery, Miller kept it a closely guarded secret for years. In 1969, he and his brother, Delvin Miller, a renowned harness racer, opened what was then called the Meadowcroft Museum of Rural History on the farm. Not too long after, he decided the time was right to unearth the relics that could be buried not too far below the ground. Miller contacted James Adovasio, an archaeologist then teaching at the University of Pittsburgh, and told him what he had found all those years ago.
Excavation work started on June 18, 1973.
“It’s a remote site, and it would have been easy for people to dig to find the artifacts, and that would have destroyed the context of the site,” said David Scofield, director of what is now the Meadowcroft Rockshelter and Historic Village. “So (Miller) was very proactive and kept quiet about it.”
When Adovasio and some Pitt students arrived, tools in hand, on that Monday morning 50 years ago, there was probably no way they, or anyone else, could have imagined how significant their work would turn out to be. What is now called the Meadowcroft Rockshelter is the earliest known site of human habitation in North America, with prehistoric hunters and gatherers settling at the rock overhang above Cross Creek almost 20,000 years ago. To put that in perspective, it was then only 50 miles or so from a Pleistocene ice sheet that dipped down into what is now Butler County, and the Roman Empire was still thousands of years in the future.
The five decades worth of painstaking soil removal at Meadowcroft has brought forth a bounty of material that offers important clues about the lives and habits of these early American inhabitants. There are bits and pieces of ceramics, tools made of stone and bone, fragments of baskets, and thousands of additional artifacts that have been carefully scrutinized and cataloged. Its importance was underscored when it was named a National Historic Landmark in 2005.
“Meadowcroft Rockshelter really changed how archaeologists understood when people arrived in North America,” Scofield explained. “Prior to the excavation here, it was thought that people were in North America only about 11,500 years ago.”
Additional excavation work has started again, and could continue into August. Over the last 50 years, some of the site has been excavated down to the shale bedrock, but around a third of it still remains to be explored. Scofield noted that work could end up continuing “for many years.”
When reached by phone while working at Meadowcroft, Adovasio recalled that the first round of work was originally undertaken “to train graduate students and undergraduate students in the protocols of excavation. We had no idea we’d be back over and over.”
Now 79, Adovasio said the rock shelter “will continue to produce information for at least the rest of my lifetime, if not many lifetimes into the future.”
To mark the 50th anniversary of the first excavation, Adovasio will be leading a tour of the Meadowcroft Rockshelter on Sunday, June 18, at 1 p.m. Reservations are required through www.heinzhistorycenter.org/meadowcroft. Additional information is also available by calling 724-587-3412.
“It continues to be one of the most significant archaeological sites,” Scofield said. “I don’t know if there’s anywhere else you can go where you can stand in the same spot that Ice Age people stood, and still see evidence of fire pits and some of the things they left behind.”