ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, December 28, 1995 TAG: 9512280009
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: RADFORD
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
FEELING PRESSURE from the advance of bulldozers upon valuable sites and from the volume of artifacts to be unearthed, there's a new energy being felt among valley archaeologists.
What happened to the Indians who once lived on the banks of the New River?
It's the valley's oldest mystery, our version of Roanoke Island's Lost Colony.
About 1660, an Indian village of about 300 people stood on a floodplain at present-day Bisset Park. They were farmers and hunters who built a palisade to encircle and protect their community.
By the time the first European explorers came through in 1671, the settlement was deserted.
Local archaeologists want to find out what happened. To do so, they're calling for help, or what Graham Simmerman calls "a rallying force of workers."
Simmerman, a Radford resident and a former president of the Archeological Society of Virginia, is a veteran of digging into the past. He was the primary earth mover and dirt shaker during the mid-1970s excavation of the Bisset Park settlement, which uncovered one of the largest and most significant Indian villages in our state.
Over the years, hundreds of other archaeological sites around the New River Valley have been identified. Many remain to be examined. Lately, however, their primary means of excavation has been by a bulldozer's blade.
Feeling pressure from the loss of valuable sites and from the sheer volume of artifacts to be unearthed and examined, the New River Valley's archaeological society is trying to re-energize.
Participation in the 30-year-old organization has been strong, particularly when spurred by major troves such as the Bisset Park location. Yet in recent times, interest has fallen off.
Last month, the group held a reorganization meeting. "There's quite a lot to be excited about," Cliff Boyd, a Radford University anthropology professor, told the gathering at the Radford Public Library.
Boyd and his students may be on the trail of those ghostly Indians who once lived just below their campus. They're excavating a small pit near the Hunter Ridge Apartment complex, which, like the larger Bisset Park dig, Boyd calls a "contact" site.
At both places there is subtle evidence of contact between the Indians who lived there and the first white traders who ventured inland from the Atlantic, even though they never came face-to-face.
Among the graves and refuse pits in the New River Indian village sites, archaeologists like Simmerman and Boyd have found small glass beads known to be of European manufacture.
Possibly, those trinkets came to the Indians secondhand through other tribes who lived closer to the coast. Definitely, they raise some intriguing questions about that critical time when the rising tide of explorers and settlers began to swamp the Native Americans.
Boyd told of sites excavated in North Carolina that are quite similar to the New River villages, with two important exceptions.
First, they've been carbon-dated to the late 1600s, about a generation later than the Bisset Park villages. Second, the North Carolina Indian graves revealed the presence of guns, liquor and epidemic diseases, evidence that trade between white and red men had rapidly advanced in the span of about 20 years - to the Native Americans' detriment.
"I'm amazed at how quickly things happened," Boyd said. To his mind, that makes it even more important to examine the New River sites fully and compare them with those studied in North Carolina.
Simmerman also spoke of potential local sites from other historical eras, such as pioneer days and the Civil War. There's also been talk in other circles of conducting archaeological digs into the more recent past, at the old coal mining company town at Merrimac.
Simmerman envisions a revitalized local archaeological society that joins hands with other regional groups and area schools to identify, protect and examine important sites. "The society needs to be the eyes of the area to prevent destruction," he said.
Of potential society members or volunteers, Simmerman said, "All they have to have is an interest." There's lots of work to be done, he added, both in terms of finding artifacts and sites in the field, then cataloguing the relics.
It's been said that nothing changes faster than ancient history, as new facts that illuminate the past come to light.
Simmerman says many questions remain to be answered, and the clues may be literally under our feet.
For more information about the Archeological Society of the New River Valley, contact Graham Simmerman at 639-1716 or John Ford at 951-1604.
LENGTH: Medium: 95 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. The dirty and detailed work of digging up the 17thby CNBcentury Indian settlement along New River is Radford's Bisset Park
continues - and at a faster pace. color. File photos. 2. Artifacts
dug from the Indian village in Radford include (above, from left)) a
bone tool possibly used for weaving, fish hooks, a bone pipe and
(right) numerous beads. 3. An archaeologist digs in an Indian grave
(above) at the Bisset Park site in the fall of 1974.