Meadowcroft Rockshelter
Posted by: 
Kordite
N 40° 17.181 W 080° 29.340
17T E 543436 N 4459665
Marker located at 401 Meadowcroft Rd., Avella
Waymark Code: WM70X
Location: Pennsylvania, United States
Date Posted: 02/03/2006
Views: 125
Albert Miller had always suspected that a rock overhang on his SouthWestern Pennsylvania property had once been used by Native Americans so when a groundhog decided to dig his burrow there he took advantage of the opportunity to expand the hole and see what he could dig up. Being an amateur archeoliogist he was able to identify several man-mad artifacts. Knowing that if word got out about his find, it would quickly be plundered so be re-burried everything and began a nearly two decade long search for someone to do it right.
That search ended in 1973 when a team from the University of Pittsburgh and led by Dr. James Adovasio began their dig. Their excevations took them through layer upon fine layer, indicating regular habitation all the way back to the end of the last Ice Age, 10,500 years ago when man first came to North America.
Wanting to place the rockshelter in a geological context, they continued to dig whereupon they found something unexpected: more artifacts. All the archeology of the day had said that man had arrived in the New World ten millennia ago but, by the time they reached bedrock, Adovasio's team had found irrefutable proof that this rockshelter had been used as far back as 13,000 years ago.
The revelation rocked modern archeology.
The marker reads: "A deeply stratified archaeological site whose deposits span nearly 16,000 years of Pennsylvania's past. Discovered 1973; excavated by University of Pittsburgh archaeologists. Meadowcroft provides the oldest evidence of human presence in North America and the longest sequence of human occupation in the New World. All of eastern North America's major cultural stages appear in its remarkably complete archaeological record."
Marker Name: Meadowcroft Rockshelter
County: Washington
Date Dedicated: 09/19/1999
Marker Type: Roadside
Location: 401 Meadowcroft Rd., Avella
Category: Native American
Website: [Web Link]
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