Excavations at Meadowcroft Rockshelter continuing to serve up revelations about our past
Brad Hundt/Observer-Reporter
Excavation work is happening at the Meadowcroft Rockshelter throughout June.
Brad Hundt/Observer-Reporter
Archaeologists are working at the Meadowcroft Rockshelter, where prehistoric humans camped out almost 20,000 years ago.
Brad Hundt/Observer-Reporter
Allen Quinn, a retired archaeology professor at Mercyhurst University, works at the Meadowcroft Rockshelter during an ongoing excavation project.
Brad Hundt/Observer-Reporter
Visitors have the opportunity to view the excavation work happening at the Meadowcroft Rockshelter outside Avella.
JEFFERSON – For close to a half-century, Dr. James Adovasio has been patiently excavating the Meadowcroft Rockshelter outside Avella, laboring to discover what the site will reveal about how the earliest known inhabitants of North America lived almost 20,000 years ago.
Even after all this time, there’s still plenty that can be uncovered, according to Adovasio.
“It just gets more complex,” he said last week.
For the first time since 2019, Adovasio and a crew of archaeologists have returned to the Meadowcroft Rockshelter to continue their long-running work. They are making some repairs on one section of the site, and they hope to extract artifacts from a prehistoric fire pit. It would add to the quantity of information that the Rockshelter has yielded over the years. Since 1973, when Adovasio and students from the University of Pittsburgh first started digging and hand-dusting at Meadowcroft, ancient stone tools, pottery and evidence of ice-age fire pits have been uncovered.
Through the decades, it’s been concluded that the rock ledge was a campsite for prehistoric hunters and gatherers. About one-third of the Rockshelter remains to be excavated. More recently, soil samples were tested to see if human DNA could be discovered in them.
It’s painstaking toil, and some of the information that is found will undoubtedly seem esoteric to laymen, but it is important in piecing together the whole story of the Rockshelter, Adovasio said.
“We like to think as we understand the past, we can understand the present and the future,” Adovasio pointed out.
The excavation received a financial boost from the Washington County Tourism Promotion Agency in the form of an $8,000 grant. The Rockshelter is open to visitors from May to the end of October, and they can observe the excavation from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. while it is ongoing. A livestream of the excavation is also being offered on the YouTube channel of the Senator John Heinz History Center.
Deploying this kind of technology is a far cry from the first days of the excavation in the 1970s, when a clunky computer and a dial-up modem were state of the art.
“It’s a valuable tool for educational purposes,” according to Dave Scofield, the director of Meadowcroft. “We have only scratched the surface of what we can do.”