By Jake Palmateer
Staff Writer
WEST DAVENPORT _ Sometime between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago, a small band of people made camp on the north bank of Charlotte Creek.
They ate nuts, caught fish with nets and hunted game in the hills.
| | | From left, Doug Idleman, a senior at SUCO, Skip Paulson, a master’s student at Empire State College, Ashleigh Welch, a junior at SUCO, and Stephen Bickos, a senior at SUCO, scrape with trowels in a pit Monday.
Star photo by Julie Lewis |
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Today, their campsite is a meadow and college students are gleaning what they can from the layers of earth that cover it.
Twenty-one students, most from Hartwick College and the State University College at Oneonta, are in the final week of a month-long archeological field school under the direction of Renee Walker of the SUCO anthropology department and Cynthia Klink of the Hartwick anthropology department.
The site is next to Hartwick’s Pine Lake campus, and on Monday, the students sifted and hunched over the carefully laid-out excavation site.
Cord pulled taut by stakes marked out a grid on the meadow, and any artifacts found were stored in brown paper bags and catalogued in detail.
The students learned excavation strategy, interpret sediment, how to recognize artifacts and perform laboratory analyses, Walker said.
"We just finished excavating a big fire pit," Walker said.
The students worked for nine days on the pit, which contained charcoal and fire-cracked rock.
Artifacts uncovered at the site include spear points, net sinkers and dozens of "nutting stones" used to grind seeds or nuts.
"We start to get most of our cultural material at about 30 centimeters," Walker said.
Teaching assistant Nicole Thorn, a 2005 SUCO graduate and graduate student at the State University at Albany, held up a stone point she said was probably used as a knife.
It appears the people who inhabited the campsite used spears but did not have ceramics or bow-and-arrow technology, Walker said.
An abundance of nuts, as well as animals that feed on nuts, such as deer and squirrels, would have made the area an attractive place to spend time, Walker said.
Nearby Pine Lake and the creek are also key reasons why the site may have been continuously used for thousands of years.
The oldest artifacts found in that area are thought to be around 9,000 years old, she said.
The groups that used the campsite under excavation probably numbered between 25 and 50 people and likely occupied the area on a seasonal basis, Walker said.
"Fall would be our best guess," Walker said. "You have several opportunities to increase your larders for the winter."
The group that lived there probably migrated to different places around the area and possibly wintered underneath rock ledges.
"They wouldn’t have been living here year-round," Walker said.
The food may have been so plentiful in the fall that the area could have supported several bands who would gather near each other.
"This would have been a good area for several groups to get together," Walker said. "It might have been a time when they sat around and exchanged stories."
The field school is offered every two years.
"This is my first actual dig like this," said Skip Paulson, who is working on a master’s degree from Empire State College.
Paulson, a seventh-grade social studies teacher at Oneonta Middle School, said he plans to incorporate some of what he learns into his lessons on American Indians.
"Every bit of this helps build a better picture," said Paulson, who is of Omaha heritage. "This is wonderful."
Hartwick senior Elliott Watts sifted soil through a wire mesh, one component of the meticulous process of archeology.
In addition to being a teaching tool, the field school helps complete the picture of early Americans, he said.
"I feel like it’s definitely beneficial," Watts said. "When you find something big like an arrowhead, it really makes it interesting."
