by Richard L. George
The picture was alarming: Native Americans inhabiting eastern North
America in the 13th and 14th centuries combatted the “Little Ice Age,”
overpopulation and a drain on natural resourcesproducing hard times that
scientists are only recently discovering.
In 198991, archaeologists from Carnegie Museum of Natural History excavated
a site in Washington County, Pennsylvania, finding that as a result of
these stresses the people living there suffered from very poor nutrition.
Some scholars suggest that the Native American population in North America
was at its peak just before 12001300 and that this period of hardship
was the beginning of a decline that accelerated in the 16th century with
the influx of Europeans with alien diseases.
The archaeological site that yielded our information is located less
than a mile south of Ladbroke at the Meadows Race Track in Washington County,
on the former Wylie Farm. The site is on a bench overlooking an unnamed
stream that leads to a tributary of Chartiers Creek. Its proximity to major
highways and population centers generated public interest in excavating
it before it fell victim to development as did much of the Wylie property.
Members of the Allegheny chapter of the Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology
joined museum scientists in excavating the site, which was bisected by
road construction in the 19th century.
Artifacts collected from the surface were mostly of Late Prehistoric-Monongahela
origin and were donated to Carnegie Museum of Natural History by the landowners.
Radiocarbon dating and settlement pattern analysis of these items indicated
that the site was occupied four times during the Late Prehistoric Period,
ca. 9001600. The two most prominent of these occupations occurred around
1170 and again around 1330.
A map of the site shows the villages with round houses and protective
stockades, but the houses of the later village are somewhat smaller. There
is one other significant difference: Within some of the subsurface pits
of the 1330 village were found the diminutive shells of the Shawnee Rocksnail,
Lithasic obovata pennsylvanica. I believe that these shells represent the
remains of a very poor source of nutrition for a desperate people! A similar
situation was hypothesized for an earlier site in central Tennessee, where
freshwater gastropodsa poor source of nutritionmay have been boiled to
produce a broth or stock.
The relative paucity of charred plant material, whether wild or domesticated,
is more evidence that the site occupants were under stress. Maize, a higher
quality source of nutrition, was found in only 34 percent of these pits,
compared with 50 percent or more on three other Monongahela sites that
we studied. These three other sites were occupied at different, and probably
more prosperous, times than the Wylie site.
Based on our recommendations, The Archaeological Conservancya national
organization that buys archaeological sites and preserves them as cultural
resourcespurchased three other Monongahela sites on the Wylie Farm in
1995. The Wylie site that we excavated was not included in the transaction
because it had already been impacted by road construction and the excavations.
As of August 1997, all of the remaining land on the Wylie Farm is under
development.
There are now very few large-scale excavations of prehistoric villages
taking place in eastern North America. Thus, we are anxious to return to
the site in the near future to complete the excavation. We want to get
a “big-picture view” of the entire village, and we also hope to find evidence
of the types of houses built by later populations. Finishing the Wylie
site will add to an important database provided by archaeologists at Carnegie
Museum of Natural History. We hope that we can get back to the site before
it falls victim to development and disappears, as did the people who once
lived there.
Richard L. George is a field archaeologist at Carnegie Museum of
Natural History.
