ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 29, 1996 TAG: 9612300010
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JANIE BRYANT LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
BY GOING DEEPER - beyond where others have stopped in satisfaction - archaeologists have found tools they believe prove that people lived in this state as far back as 16,000 years ago.
About 13,000 years before Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, people were gathering around a fire in what is now Sussex County.
Or at least that's what two archaeologists believe. They have spent the past four years digging for clues to Virginia's prehistoric past at a site called Cactus Hill.
With radiocarbon dates that place their finds as far back as 16,000 years, the site is one of the oldest found in the Western Hemisphere.
Many American archaeologists believe the earliest human occupation of North America was 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.
Earlier human occupants would have been extremely scarce, and finding signs of them would be like finding a needle in a haystack, said Randolph Turner, director of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources' regional office in Portsmouth.
The department's statewide Threatened Sites Program has funded much of the research and tests done on materials found at the site.
Cactus Hill, Turner said, ``is one of a handful of sites dating to this early period in all of North and South America. This is truly unique - it's of international significance.''
In October, it was the lead story in The Mammoth Hunter, a publication of Oregon State University's Center for the First Americans.
``It's already pulled interest from some of the top people in the discipline,'' said Michael Johnson, one of the two archaeologists excavating at the site. ``They're just waiting for more dates. And I think there are plenty of them there.''
Johnson works for the Fairfax County Park Authority and surveys Ice Age projectile points for the Archeological Society of Virginia. He first heard about Cactus Hill from a collector who wanted him to record some Clovis points she had found. The points are named for the New Mexico site where they were first found in association with the extinct mammoth of the Ice Age.
For decades, most archaeologists have believed those prehistoric fluted points were the tools of the earliest people to live in North America, Johnson said.
The collector told Johnson where she found them, and he contacted Joseph McAvoy, a materials scientist whose company does archaeological research in that area.
McAvoy, who has written a book on Clovis settlement patterns, already had done some excavation at Cactus Hill but also was working on other sites at the Nottoway River. The Cactus Hill site is about 100 yards from the Nottoway, near a sand pit in a swamp-surrounded area owned by a large paper company and leased by a hunt club.
McAvoy and Johnson began independent excavations on several areas of Cactus Hill in 1993. Each had volunteer help from colleges and chapters of the Archeological Society of Virginia, as well as other individuals interested in archaeology.
``We found a really nice Clovis working surface where they had dropped all the tools and points and stuff, but we didn't find a hearth, and we went down to the next level below Clovis and we did,'' McAvoy said. ``We found a scatter of white pine charcoal, and we said, `Here's our hearth.' These guys must have been digging little basins and building their fires down in these basins below the primary working surface.''
McAvoy said they also noticed some quartzite-core blades with the hearth.
``When the radiocarbon date came back, it wasn't at all what we had expected to see in terms of a Clovis date,'' McAvoy said. ``It was 4,000 years older than Clovis.''
At that point, the two researchers started taking a more careful look at the levels below Clovis.
The ``basic tenet of American archaeology and most archaeologists is that when you get down to Clovis, there really isn't anything below it,'' McAvoy said. ``So when you get down to Clovis ... you're very satisfied, and the average archaeologist probably wouldn't have a tendency to say maybe we should dig 6 feet more.''
The rarity of such sites has made it hard to arrive at a consensus among archaeologists about who were the first people in North America.
``That's been the big fight in American archaeology for a long time,'' Johnson said. ``In the 1970s, an archaeologist found this sequence that we've got, up in the Pittsburgh area in a rock shelter called Meadowcroft.''
Find confirmed
It was difficult for those in the field who believed there were people earlier than Clovis, he said, because there was nothing to go on but the one site at Meadowcroft.
Cactus Hill, he said, ``is really sort of confirming what was found way back then, and it's doing it in spades, since we have found this sequence on several parts of the site.
``I'm into it now, whereas before I really didn't know,'' he said of the theory that people were in North America long before the Clovis period. ``I'll tell you, it changes your whole way of thinking.''
Standing at the site, McAvoy said thousands of years of windblown sand probably rounded out what was once a steeper ridge.
That ridge probably drew prehistoric people who were seeking a dry campsite with enough wind to give them a reprieve from insects, Johnson said.
During the Ice Age, a glacier was probably only 500 miles from the site, and, in the summer, the wind blowing off the melting ice was producing quite a bit of precipitation, he said.
``In the summertime back then, the bug problem would have been awful,'' Johnson said. ``So, you're going to seek the most windswept area.
``And the only soil around there that's really well-drained is the sand, or would have been then. You don't want to be sleeping in water - particularly cold water.''
McAvoy believes the core blades - the artifacts found in the pre-Clovis level - are an ``intermediate type of tool to produce other tools from bone or wood.''
But the analyses that can tell how the tools were used has just begun.
`Learned a lot'
McAvoy said the Department of Historic Resources plans to publish a 500-page volume next year on the research at the site.
A major symposium on the work will be conducted in March at the 1997 Middle Atlantic Archaeological Conference in Ocean City, Md.
Following a series of papers presented by scholars conducting research at the site, Dennis Stanford, chairman of the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution, will summarize and critique the findings.
``We learned a lot about change,'' McAvoy said. ``We learned not only about how the material culture of people changed over, say, 15,000 years, but we learned a lot, too, about how the forest itself had changed.''
The forests at the site, 15,000 or 16,000 years ago, were apparently made up of conifers such as white pine, he said.
With the glaciers taking up much of the ocean water, the Atlantic around that time was probably 80 miles farther east, he said.
``So trees that might grow only now in the highest part of the Appalachian Mountains, we could find then at Cactus Hill,'' McAvoy said.
Then, with climatic changes, the forest changed to a series of hard southern pines, he said.
The findings from earlier hunting cultures, from 4,000 to 9,000 years ago, were exciting, too, McAvoy said.
``We found enough of those artifacts to indicate to us that Cactus Hill was a fairly well-used location,'' he said.
Today, Cactus Hill is a remote area off winding roads that wrap around swamp land not far from the rural town of Waverly.
But it isn't hard for the archaeologists to see how it drew people thousands of years ago.
``You have to understand the area around Cactus Hill,'' McAvoy said. ``It's primarily low and swampy, but here where the site is located is a very high sandy hill.
``And it's right next to a `grocery store,''' he said, referring to the clay bottom wetland to the south. ``That natural basin apparently for a long period of time has been an area that has produced a variety of plant foods, which in turn would attract a large number of animals.''
It appears from bones found in unearthed fire pits that early Americans made meals out of everything from deer and fish to a large cat - probably a bobcat, McAvoy said.
They seemed especially fond of turtles and wild turkey, a bird that still can be heard gobbling near the river.
Another draw to the site, in addition to food, was the materials needed to make hunting tools. Quartzite cobbles were exposed in the shoals and beds of the Nottoway River.
``It was very, very good quality quartzite for making stone tools,'' McAvoy said. ``So now you see, that completes the picture of just about everything these people needed.''
Beyond the amenities that Cactus Hill offered prehistoric people, thousands and thousands of years later it would offer its own blessings to archaeologists.
Over thousands of years, sand deposits that had overflown from the river would be picked up by the wind and brought up to the top of the ridge, where the sand would drop out and deposit over earlier occupations, McAvoy said.
``Geologically, there are not many places where over a period of time things just continue to build up,'' McAvoy said. ``Certainly not in the eastern U.S. Things tend to want to build up and erode, and build up and erode.''
That buildup gave archaeologists the kind of stratified site they needed to put their finds into context.
Now others will know what types of materials to look for in the pre-Clovis time period.
``A preponderance of data is what will win the day on it,'' Johnson said, ``and what we've done is, we've opened up a whole new direction for other archaeologists.''
LENGTH: Long : 175 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: MARK MITCHELL Landmark News Service. Researchers dateby CNBthe projectile point (left) found at the Suffolk County site at
11,000 years old and the quartzite blade as up to 16,000 years old.
color.