Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 17, 1995 TAG: 9509180004
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-6 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: SALTVILLE LENGTH: Medium
Volunteers from Virginia Tech, Radford University and places such as the Smithsonian Institution learn quickly that opening Saltville's window on the Ice Age is anything but glamorous work.
They spend summers working with what amount to tiny spoons, chipping away at layers of mud to see at what levels various artifacts or fossils can be found. Those levels help pinpoint the age of the find, along with techniques such as radiocarbon dating.
Some may use screens to sift through dirt for knowledge the way prospectors would for gold. Their work site is a pit deepened gradually over the years of research and always threatening to fill up with water.
"We always had a pump, but it didn't always work," McDonald said recently at a talk on Saltville and the Ice Age that drew several hundred listeners in Abingdon during its annual Virginia Highlands Festival.
"Once you get down in the mud, everybody's equal, everybody's dirty, and you get on with the job together," said McDonald, a former Radford University professor who is now a partner in a Blacksburg publishing firm. He took Radford classes on field trips to Saltville during summers.
McDonald has been returning to Saltville for 15 years, now as a research associate with the Virginia Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian. But people were digging things out of Saltville long before that - at least as far back as the time of Thomas Jefferson, who referred in a 1787 letter to a mastodon tooth from there.
When McDonald came to look at some of the activity in October 1980, he said, "I was planning on spending maybe an hour in Saltville, and that would be it." Soon, he was bringing Radford students on digs each summer.
Remains of ground sloth, mammoth, mastodon and extinct types of moose and musk ox are among the fossils recovered, as well as reptile, fish and plant fossils. McDonald recalled a volunteer being so excited about uncovering some prehistoric bones that she drove into Saltville to tell him. When she spotted him on the street, she neglected to turn off her engine when she jumped out of the car. He had to chase it down to stop it.
"We're at the point now of taking a look at all of that information," he said, "and arriving at some kind of synthesis."
The plants and animals that have been discovered have been catalogued, and their relationship to one another is now being determined. "Saltville can address that, and it can also address a lot of other questions" as the emphasis moves from research to education, McDonald said.
"I'd like to see this become sort of a laboratory" for such an educational project, he said.
That is happening already. McDonald is also president of the Saltville Foundation, which is working toward construction of the Museum of the Middle Appalachians.
That museum, once built, will address not only Saltville's early history but the paleo-Indians who lived here and the more recent Civil War history when its salt works made it of strategic importance. There is more information on the prehistoric American Indians in Saltville than anywhere in North America, McDonald said.
Edward J. Verner, director of the museum project, said the Saltville area can show an uninterrupted history dating back 14,000 years. "What's more, that history is one that has been punctuated by some pretty dramatic events," he said.
Saltville's history extends even to the moon, Verner said. As chronicled in a booklet by Martha Turnage, "Saltville: The Demise of a Company Town," a firm that made hydrazine for rocket fuel became one of the earliest casualties of tougher environmental restrictions in the early 1970s.
Further information on the museum project is available by writing to P.O. Box 910, Saltville 24370 or by telephoning 496-3633. "We're really looking at breaking ground about two years from now," Verner said. "And the dig itself is a sort of real-time exhibit in its own right."
Radiocarbon dating and other research shows human beings to have been in what is now the Saltville area as far back as 11,500 years ago, McDonald said. South America still claims the oldest finds attributable to human beings in this hemisphere, going back 13,800 years, but there is more data on paleo-Indians who lived in what is now Saltville than anywhere else in Virginia.
The floor of the Saltville valley has a flat mud layer, which is why so many artifacts and fossils have been preserved and not washed away. Saltville is clearly an important repository for research, McDonald said, and the museum will make it even more so.
by CNB