00:19 - From an archeological point of view, Meadowcroft is significant

00:22 - because it revolutionized the way archeologists

00:25 - started thinking about the peopling of North America.

00:28 - Well, Meadowcroft site is,

00:31 - a 19,000 year old archeological site

00:34 - that has contributed to the knowledge of when people arrived in North America.

00:39 - What's happened is the door was opened for archeologists to realize

00:43 - that people came into North America a long, long time ago.

00:47 - Much earlier than had been anticipated or thought

00:50 - before.

00:54 - The Meadowcroft Rock shelter was discovered by a man named Albert

00:58 - Miller, and the Miller family had been in,

01:03 - Western Pennsylvania since 1794,

01:06 - when Albert's great great grandfather first purchased property here.

01:11 - And then, it was 1955.

01:14 - Albert was still on the farm that his great grand, great great grandfather

01:18 - started.

01:19 - And Albert was in addition

01:22 - to being a, award winning farmer.

01:25 - He was the local historian and an amateur archeologist.

01:29 - And Albert knew what rock shelters were, and he always suspected

01:33 - that his rock shelter would have been used by native people.

01:38 - On November

01:39 - 12th, 1955, he was walking through the site here,

01:43 - and he saw that a groundhog had excavated

01:46 - a threshold.

02:03 - He thought this was a good opportunity

02:05 - for him to test his theory.

02:09 - And he went home, got his shovel and screen,

02:13 - and came back and enlarged the hole.

02:15 - And he found more.

02:17 - He found other artifacts, including a flint knife,

02:22 - that we now have on exhibit at our visitor center.

02:26 - So he knew he was right.

02:28 - And Albert was wise enough to know he should keep quiet about it.

02:32 - Because in this rural location, chances are good

02:37 - that people would have looted

02:38 - and destroyed the site just digging for the artifacts.

02:41 - And so he kept quiet about it while he made connections with the,

02:46 - academic and archeological community

02:49 - to see if there was a professional that would be interested in excavating.

02:54 - And so that quest took him 18 years,

02:58 - and it wasn't until 1973, when the first professional excavation

03:03 - took place at Meadowcroft by the University of Pittsburgh

03:06 - under the direction of Doctor James out of Aiken.

03:16 - So by 1973,

03:18 - Albert's effort to get a professional out here was successful.

03:23 - And Doctor James out of Asco, who was a new professor

03:27 - at the University of Pittsburgh that year, came out with a group of students

03:31 - because his charge at the University of Pittsburgh was to conduct a field school

03:36 - to train students in the protocols of, of archeology.

03:40 - And so in the spring of 73,

03:43 - he came out to see the site and decided this would would work well for him,

03:49 - since his expertise was in excavating caves and rock shelters out west.

03:54 - They started the first, summer field school for students

03:59 - in June of 1973,

04:02 - and, that continued, for three months.

04:07 - And, then every year after that, for six years,

04:12 - they conducted a full summer long field school at the site.

04:15 - Well, I first got involved with Meadowcroft over 52 years ago.

04:20 - I was a young graduate student.

04:22 - I decided that I wanted to become an archeologist,

04:26 - and I entered the University of Pittsburgh's field school.

04:29 - Doctor Fazio was my advisor.

04:32 - And so every summer of the early days of my graduate career,

04:37 - we would come to Meadowcroft for over 5 or 6 years.

04:41 - I excavated every single summer here.

04:43 - As a graduate student, it was fun.

04:46 - It was exciting because we knew we were on the cusp of a breakthrough.

04:51 - We knew we were in a really wonderfully interesting archeological site.

04:56 - There were probably about, at the maximum, about maybe

05:00 - 30 to 50 archeologists working here at one time.

05:03 - Not everyone in the rock shelter people down by the creek screening,

05:07 - for artifacts.

05:11 - Probably the

05:12 - biggest challenge faced by the crew working here,

05:16 - is the fact that every place you put a trial in the ground, you hit rock.

05:22 - You just constantly hit rock.

05:24 - You can see in the excavation there are large rocks

05:27 - there are medium sized rocks there.

05:29 - Small rocks. There's rocks everywhere.

05:31 - And that's a result of, the erosion of the rock shelter.

05:35 - So over time, these pieces of rock fall,

05:38 - they remain in the site until they're excavated.

05:42 - And in order to excavate properly, those have to be exposed

05:46 - and then mapped in, before they're removed to excavate any further.

05:52 - So it was a very slow and tedious process.

05:55 - I was the stratigraphy expert, and I was the person who excavated

05:59 - with razor blades and, so many things that I would find were,

06:03 - interpreting, cultural features in the, in this stratigraphic profile.

06:09 - I also worked on a basketry fragment that, had to be excavated very carefully.

06:14 - We had to inject it with, plastics to stabilize it

06:18 - before we were able to excavate it and remove it from the dirt itself.

06:22 - So that was really cool.

06:23 - But every time in,

06:26 - in this site, at that time when we would excavate,

06:29 - we would find small bones, we would find artifacts,

06:32 - we would find arrowheads, we would find fire pits, cultural features.

06:36 - And, everything about it was exciting.

06:39 - At the time.

06:40 - The primary tools used by the excavators,

06:43 - is a trowel, a pointed, small trowel,

06:49 - with which they can excavate very carefully.

06:51 - However, in certain circumstances

06:54 - in this site, the layers of the site are so thin that they're actually thinner

06:59 - than the blade of the trowel and required using something smaller.

07:04 - So in some cases, they were using single edge razor blades to excavate.

07:09 - So that, just gives you an idea of how slow and how tedious

07:14 - and how precise the excavation work was carried out.

07:19 - So during the course of the excavation,

07:21 - there were 20,000 artifacts recovered from this site,

07:26 - artifacts or things that were either made or modified by people.

07:30 - That includes what we all think about is that the lithic, the stone

07:34 - projectile points, arrow points and spear points

07:39 - in total, I think there are, just over 50

07:42 - points recovered from the site.

07:45 - But there were a lot of flakes that were the result

07:49 - of either manufacturing or sharpening those points.

07:54 - And so

07:55 - all of those are artifacts as well, because they provide clues

07:59 - as to the process of producing these tools.

08:03 - There were, other stone tools, like, like blades,

08:07 - perforations, scrapers, those are all artifacts.

08:13 - There were, wooden tools,

08:17 - bone tools,

08:19 - basketry fragments, pottery fragments.

08:22 - Those are all artifacts.

08:23 - And there were 20,000 in all recovered from this site.

08:28 - In addition to that, there were

08:30 - 956,000 animal remains recovered.

08:33 - About 98% of those represent small mammal bones

08:38 - from raptors dropping the bones at the site.

08:41 - However, there were a number of bones that showed evidence that people

08:45 - had actually butchered the animals here so that those include things like elk,

08:50 - whitetail deer, turkey, grouse, turtles,

08:54 - rabbits, bear.

08:57 - All of the typical game animal suspects that you might think of.

09:01 - In addition to the animal remains,

09:04 - there were 1.4 million plant remains recovered.

09:07 - So that's everything from pollen samples

09:11 - up to, nut holes and seeds

09:15 - and, even, other pieces of wood.

09:18 - So there's been a wealth of material that's been recovered

09:21 - from the site, and not all of it has been fully studied yet.

09:24 - The artifacts that were found in the Groundhog Hole were very interesting

09:28 - because, they led us to realize that the site was a lot older then.

09:34 - You know, then people had thought, now the original fire pit

09:38 - that was existed here when people partied here, when we first

09:44 - started excavating that on the very top, we found, aluminum beer cans

09:50 - and then as we excavated down deeper, we found steel beer cans.

09:55 - And, you know, the first the pop tops and then the steel beer cans were used.

09:59 - The old church key.

10:00 - And as we kept on digging down deeper, then we found beer bottles

10:04 - and then down deeper, we found colonial bottles.

10:09 - And so in the upper layers of that campsite that it was existed.

10:14 - When we first started excavating, it was evidence that people were staying

10:19 - here, having a good time, sort of partying as they did probably 19,000 years ago.

10:24 - So, but as we excavated down deeper and then the ground as the Albert Millers

10:29 - groundhog burrow, showed us, there were prehistoric artifacts down below.

10:34 - So we knew that this site had a lot of potential for really early finds.

10:39 - And it was so exciting to see that.

10:41 - So you can see here in this profile, there's a rib bone from a white

10:45 - tailed deer and a long bone from that same deer

10:49 - still in situ here that,

10:52 - represents a deer that was butchered here probably around 400 years ago.

10:57 - Meadowcroft tells the

10:58 - story of ancient people

11:01 - who traversed the Bering Strait from Siberia into North America.

11:06 - These are the first people to enter

11:09 - the North American continent, referred to as paleo Indians.

11:13 - We have no idea what they called themselves.

11:14 - This is during pre-history.

11:16 - So there's no written records.

11:18 - We're going just on the evidence that's left behind.

11:22 - But we know they were here and we know they were here in 19,000 years ago.

11:26 - The fact that we have a site right here that displays 19,000 years of constant

11:32 - human activity is extremely rare for any archeology site anywhere.

11:38 - Well, this is a time before agriculture.

11:41 - So the people that used this site in pre-history were hunter gatherers.

11:47 - And so life for them and following the food across the landscape

11:52 - so they would come to a site like Meadowcroft, make camp spend here,

11:57 - they spent either, you know, overnight or up to a couple of weeks at a time

12:01 - while they exploited the natural resources in the area surrounding us.

12:06 - So they were using aquatic resources from the creek.

12:10 - They were collecting, nuts and fruit and seeds.

12:14 - They were collecting plant materials that could be used.

12:18 - And, after a period of a couple of weeks at most,

12:22 - they harvested everything that was here and they moved on.

12:26 - So it was, a life of being constantly on the move.

12:44 - So we're standing at the base of the stairs,

12:46 - going up to the Meadowcroft Rock shelter,

12:48 - and you can see the facility that was built over top of the excavation

12:52 - to protect the archeological resource and to make it accessible to the public.

12:57 - So, that enclosure now makes accessible

13:02 - the archeology excavation for our visitors to see the site

13:06 - and to watch any excavation that takes place over the years.

13:27 - When visitors come to Meadowcroft,

13:29 - they're first impressed by this structure that's built in the cliff face.

13:34 - It's high above the parking lot, accessible by a set of stairs.

13:39 - And, it's built up here because this is where the people in pre-history stayed.

13:45 - We have evidence of their visits here in the excavation that's visible

13:50 - to people from the observation platform that's cantilevered over the excavation.

13:54 - So they're looking from the railing down

13:56 - into the excavation to see that evidence of, campsites.

14:00 - When you're a visitor, sometimes you don't see what, What?

14:04 - As an archeologist, what I see.

14:06 - So what we're looking at is the site

14:10 - having been excavated out, the dirt has been removed.

14:14 - And what you're looking at, right here is a is a place to seen floor,

14:19 - and you're looking at the walls that we've left intact,

14:22 - showing how deeply we've dug down from the surface

14:26 - all the way down to the deepest Pleistocene level.

14:28 - So what you're looking at is, from the surface of the ground, which is

14:32 - modern times, down into the Holocene, which is, modern climatic times

14:38 - all the way down into the Pleistocene, 19,000 years.

14:41 - So you're looking at.

14:49 - So this

14:49 - summer's excavation was really exciting because we wanted

14:53 - to concentrate on the Lower Pleistocene floors of the site

14:57 - to see if there was anything left to be recovered in.

15:01 - And in fact, there was, in this layer, as I had mentioned before,

15:06 - this is the place to seen Holocene boundary.

15:09 - So we're in the Pleistocene floor.

15:11 - We're probably around 11,000, maybe even 12,000 years ago.

15:16 - What you see here is a little dark lens from here all the way here.

15:22 - And it goes sort of down into this whole

15:25 - this is an indication that it could be a cultural feature.

15:29 - It could be, an area where, the floor was burned,

15:33 - a roasting, a roasting pit as it goes down into this whole,

15:38 - we were finding some flakes associated with this.

15:43 - On the other hand, it could also be,

15:45 - a buried soil that people were living on as well.

15:48 - So without, having the radiocarbon dates back yet

15:52 - from this feature, we're going to be taking a closer

15:56 - look at it to, determine exactly what it is.

15:59 - But this is the kind of thing

16:01 - that is found all through the 19,000 years of Meadowcroft.

16:05 - In the stratigraphic profile

16:08 - as a visitor stands at the railing, looks into the excavation.

16:11 - One of the first things that they notice

16:13 - are all of the little round tags that are in the excavation walls,

16:17 - and those are put there by the archeologists, as they excavate

16:23 - to, indicate the specific,

16:26 - layer or strata, in the site.

16:30 - And it's a device that helps them understand

16:33 - where they are in the excavation at any time.

16:37 - Because those those layers indicate time periods.

16:40 - And, so some of them are very small, some are much larger.

16:46 - But those tags indicate the layer which is is numbered through a system.

16:51 - To help them understand that there's also some tags that represent features,

16:57 - cultural features that are found something like a fire pit

17:00 - or a roasting pit.

17:04 - And in some cases the

17:05 - tags indicate sampling points where, columns were,

17:10 - were taken out for soil samples or for pollen samples, that type of thing.

17:16 - So one of the most magnificent

17:18 - things about, Meadowcroft is its stratigraphy.

17:22 - And that's what you're seeing here.

17:24 - You're seeing banded layers of oxidized clay,

17:28 - burnt clay with material with carbon in it,

17:33 - another layer of sterile clay and sand,

17:37 - and then another darker layer of an organic layer of some sort,

17:42 - and also down in here, this is another cultural feature

17:46 - with charcoal that you see in some bone and ash.

17:50 - So most of Meadowcroft Rock shelter

17:54 - when it was initially excavated, looked like this.

17:58 - And this is a prime example of how you can interpret

18:04 - layer upon layer upon layer over 19,000 years.

18:08 - These are the cultural layers that we would see in excavate

18:12 - throughout Meadowcroft.

18:14 - So visitors will also immediately notice all of the rock

18:18 - that is, is a part of the site and always will be.

18:24 - There are

18:24 - two rocks in particular that are notable.

18:27 - One, we call the old roof Fall

18:31 - that came down 14,000 years ago,

18:34 - and then another one that is larger

18:37 - and actually sticks up through our roofs and out through the sidewall.

18:41 - That is what we call the new roof fall.

18:43 - So that one came down between 8300 and 600.

18:48 - And, of course, those rocks are so large

18:51 - that when they fell, it changed the dynamic in here.

18:54 - And that's reflected in the archeological evidence,

18:58 - you see, where fire pits

19:00 - changed or moved around at various points in time.

19:04 - And a lot of that has to do with what the roof was like at any given

19:08 - period in time, what the floor surface was like after these rocks fell.

19:12 - So we're standing above Cross Creek, which flows to the west

19:17 - and empties into the Ohio River seven and a half miles downstream,

19:21 - and it's cross creek that cut down through the rock, forming this valley

19:27 - and eventually creating the rock shelter that you see up here.

19:31 - So with the water undercutting the sandstone feature

19:36 - that created the overhanging ledge that established

19:40 - a campsite used by people over the course of those 19,000 years.

19:45 - And it's pretty obvious that there's a softer type

19:48 - of sandstone and a harder type.

19:50 - So the type, this section with all the voids in it is the softer sandstone.

19:56 - And, it's both of those that make up the whole

20:00 - feature.

20:01 - And then that's sitting on top of the Birmingham Shale as the bedrock.

20:06 - And so the, the Meadowcroft excavation will never prove to be older

20:10 - than we already know that it is because we've gotten down to the bedrock.

20:15 - All of that has been shaped by the waters of Cross Creek over time

20:19 - that have cut down through the valley,

20:22 - over the course of 70,000 years.

20:25 - And so as, as the rocks erode, even grained by grain,

20:30 - attrition over long periods of time builds up the sediment.

20:34 - So most of what the sediment is composed of

20:37 - is sand grains, eroding from the rock face.

20:42 - What we're looking at here is, one of the,

20:45 - tallest standing walls that are left in the rock shelter.

20:49 - And this represents, probably

20:52 - at least about 10 or 12,000 years of pre-history.

20:57 - What we're seeing at the very top here

21:00 - is, it's more of a friable kind of soil.

21:05 - And this is the soil that was deposited when the new roof

21:09 - fall fell off of the reentrant roof.

21:12 - It opened up sheet wash and rain and mud coming down into the rock shelter.

21:17 - And that's what we see here as we go down deeper into these levels.

21:22 - These levels represent probably, woodland and then down into the archaic time

21:27 - period, which gets us down into 5000, 6000 years ago.

21:32 - And what you see here as an archeologist,

21:35 - this is sand here and less rocky in here.

21:39 - So this is the soil that was deposited mostly from grain by grain attrition

21:44 - from the top of the roof entrance

21:47 - onto the soil bed.

21:50 - And as we go down even farther,

21:52 - you can begin to see differences in,

21:56 - not only the soil sanding this, but the texture as well.

22:00 - And now as we go down to the deepest level, this level

22:03 - here, between here and here is the difference

22:07 - between the place two seen in the Holocene climatic events.

22:11 - And the Pleistocene probably ended around 11,500 years ago.

22:16 - So from this point down

22:19 - we are looking at a place to scene floor, and we are looking

22:23 - at some of the original floors that are early paleo Indians camped on.

22:29 - So if you can blot out mentally our beautiful structure

22:33 - that covers the excavation, the, the overhanging rock ledge

22:37 - or reentrant as geologists refer to it is, is just that.

22:42 - It's an overhanging ledge that provided a shelter campsite.

22:45 - So above the roof of this building is the overhanging rock

22:51 - that still provides shelter from the elements.

22:55 - This site faces south, so it takes advantage of the the warming of the sun.

23:00 - It's high above the creek so it doesn't flood.

23:03 - And it really just provided a perfect campsite.

23:06 - And the trees and the environment around here

23:09 - have changed very little since the time this was being used pre historically.

23:14 - So while I mentioned that the majority of the excavation took place in the 70s

23:19 - and the in in the 80s, there's still excavation that goes on today.

23:23 - There's a third of the site left to excavate.

23:26 - And that was done intentionally because,

23:28 - technology is constantly advancing.

23:32 - And so this past summer, when excavation took place, new technologies were being

23:38 - used at the site that weren't available to people in the 1970s.

23:42 - Today, it's it's so exciting that we're still excavating here today.

23:46 - 52 years later, we are excavating

23:49 - this year down to what we call the Pleistocene floor,

23:53 - which is the Ice Age floor and, we have uncovered some, artifacts.

23:58 - We've had, uncovered some cultural features.

24:01 - We haven't dated anything yet

24:03 - because we simply just we're actually ending our excavation this week.

24:06 - So we haven't analyzed the material yet, but this is an area of the site

24:10 - that's quite interesting.

24:11 - There's still more to excavate.

24:13 - As we had mentioned,

24:17 - about

24:17 - one third of the site is still left on excavated for this reason.

24:21 - And the other thing that was interesting this summer is

24:23 - we were able to bring new technology into the picture as well.

24:26 - So, for example, we used lidar,

24:30 - in the site to, to help

24:32 - map and create three dimensional models of the excavation

24:36 - that will be helpful in studying the site even after the excavation ends.

24:40 - So lidar mapping, we flew, a drone over the site

24:44 - to get aerial photographs of the site.

24:46 - And now we're going to be, doing

24:49 - some really intensive soil, analysis.

24:52 - And I would like to even do

24:53 - some more radiocarbon dating, some new radiocarbon dating

24:56 - that is a little bit more precise than it used to be, a while ago.

25:00 - So it's very exciting what we've done this summer.

25:04 - So, there's there's much more work to do, and we'll continue to do that

25:08 - little by little.

25:09 - And what's most exciting is there's still more to find.

25:13 - It's really important to preserve the rock shelter, because this is,

25:18 - a National Historic Landmark that provides,

25:22 - some of the earliest evidence of people in North America.

25:26 - And it's also an active archeological site.

25:29 - So we want to preserve the sites so that

25:32 - the general public can come and see the evidence for themselves.

25:35 - We get visitors every year from,

25:39 - other parts of the world that already know about the Meadowcroft Rock shelter,

25:42 - and they want to make a point of seeing it while they're here in the US.

25:46 - So, it is an internationally known site.

25:51 - As a significant North American archeological site.

25:55 - We want the scientific inquiry to continue.

25:59 - So, excavations can go on here.

26:04 - And for as long as, as it takes

26:07 - and, preserving the site is a is a means to achieve that.

26:11 - And again, it's been a part of my life for 52 years.

26:14 - And the fact that I'm still here excavating tomorrow will be, is just,

26:18 - extremely rewarding.