ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, April 20, 1996 TAG: 9604220022
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: SALTVILLE
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
A VIRGINIA RESEARCHER has found evidence of human life near what is now Saltville, a find causing scientists to rethink ideas about human existence in North America.
The possibility that Ice Age Indians lived nearly 14,000 years ago around what is now Saltville is exciting, researchers say, but no real surprise.
"I don't think that's an unusual date," said Ann Cupp, with the Smithsonian Institution's department of anthropology in Washington, D.C.
That's because other recent discoveries have already moved back the dates of human life in North America, including one at still another Virginia research site.
Last September in Sussex County, archaeologist Joe McAvoy of Sandston announced that he and other volunteers had unearthed stone tools and remnants of a cooking fire found to be nearly 11,000 years old by radiocarbon dating.
The tools appear to be from the so-called Clovis culture, believed to have crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia to North America 12,000 to 13,000 years ago. Archaeologists have known since the 1930s that the culture existed in Virginia, but the discovery at Cactus Hill on the Nottoway River marked its first dating.
The Saltville discovery would mean that human beings got to the American continents earlier than the Clovis date. "While it's not surprising, that does not make it less important," state Archaeologist Catherine Slusser said of the announcement.
Jerry McDonald announced the Saltville find in a paper he presented April 11 on the dating of Ice Age human beings butchering and cooking a mastodon. He made the presentation in Charlotte, N.C., at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers. McDonald has been leading archaeological work at Saltville as a research associate with the Smithsonian and the Martinsville-based Virginia Museum of Natural History for years.
It created a sensation. McDonald said last week he plans to publish a brief report of his findings in a major scientific journal, and a detailed monograph after more research at the site.
Most of the site is currently under water, which will have to be pumped out when studies resume next summer.
McDonald and his associates have been keeping the discovery under wraps for four years, to make sure all the analyses were confirmed. "We thought that we had this and haven't changed our minds since 1992,'' he said. "There was no reason to rush into an announcement."
He first visited Saltville in 1980, at the invitation of geologist Charles Bartlett, after Saltville resident Charlie Bill Totten found a few bones that proved to be from a prehistoric musk ox. McDonald, a Radford University faculty member at the time, thought it would take only a few hours to check out the find.
"What happened was those few bones became a lot of bones," he said, referring to when he and others began digging around them. They uncovered the most complete set of ancient musk ox bones found in North America except for Alaska.
McDonald led students and other volunteers back to Saltville each summer to dig out more data. "It was a gold mine, as far as information on the Ice Age," he said. Totten and Bartlett have continued among the volunteers for the entire 16 years.
A South American site in the southern half of Chile held, until now, the record for the earliest confirmed human habitation in the Western Hemisphere at 13,800 years ago. The radiocarbon results date the Saltville finds at 13,950 years, plus or minus 50 years, McDonald said.
McDonald's association with the Smithsonian came through Clayton Ray, now curator emeritus in the museum's paleobiology department. McDonald had worked with Ray on earlier projects. Ray has told the Associated Press the Saltville site shows solid evidence of human habitation 14,000 years ago, but noted that it will take finding other similarly dated sites to make it "a truth."
Slusser, the state archaeologist, said there should be other sites between Virginia and Alaska. Obviously, the arrivals from Asia did not stop in Virginia first.
"I have no delusions at all thinking this is the oldest site," McDonald said - not even the oldest in the Saltville area.
Work resumed recently at the Sussex County site, where there have been hints of an even older layer beneath the one dated 11,000 years old. "They're back in there right now," David Hazzard, with the state Department of Historic Resources, said last week. The department funded the study.
Hazzard said McAvoy and his group have been joined by volunteers from Arizona, Pennsylvania, the Smithsonian and the Archeological Society of Virginia "because of their interest in the possibilities of this site."
There has been evidence of the Clovis culture, named for the New Mexico city where its remnants first were found, at two other Virginia sites. One is about 12 miles away from Cactus Hill, in Dinwiddie County. The other is in Warren County in the northern Shenandoah Valley.
But Saltville has something that none of the others has: a mud layer, left by a river that once covered the valley, which sealed and preserved a rich and unbroken record of the plant and animal life that existed before the earliest Paleo-Indians visited here.
For that reason, Saltville may have even more secrets hidden beneath its clay seal. Only time will tell.
LENGTH: Medium: 99 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP file/1995. Jerry McDonald examines a find at a dig inby CNBSaltville, where he says may lie the earliest evidence yet of life
in North America. color.