Analyzing Proto-Susquehannock sites in the Upper Susquehanna River Valley

Last spring I received an email from one of our SRAC professional advisors, Dr. Kurt Jordan, and anthropologist from Cornell University. He had a student that he said that he thought just might be as obsessed with the Susquehannocks (click here to learn more) as I was - and that he wanted her to come down to SRAC and to have us share all that we know and to share all that we had on every site in our region.

Jasmine also graduated from Elizabethtown College 2009 with two B.A's: one in history and another in sociology/anthropology. Her field work includes: Washington Boro site (Susquehannock - Lancaster, PA), Fort Hunter site (1760's - Harrisburg, PA), London Town (18th century - Edgewater, MD), Pig Point (12thCentury- Anne Arundel County, MD), Walhain-St.Paul site (14th Century - Walhain, Belgium). Currently employed full time as an archaeological field technician with Historic Saint Mary's City in Maryland.

When Jasmine first arrived at SRAC, I gave her all of my research on all the sites I have studied and all of the resources that I used - to include 400-plus letters from the 1916 Moorehead expedition through our region, the videos and reports on the Englebert site, the Griffin report, and many others...Ted Keir also spent several days with her and showed her all the information, photos and slides that he had on all the sites in our region to include the Kennedy site. I also asked SRAC's Don Hunt to join in and take her on a ride to physically show her the sites in our region and I even made a phone call to the family that now own "the Murray Garden" and they walked that site that day as well. We also sent Jasmine to the Tioga Point Museum to see what else they might have that she could use, and although they refused to let her see any skeletal materials, she was happy with what she found there as well.

All of this as well as time she spent with professionals such as Dr. Barry Kent and researching sites such as the Washington Boro Susquehannock site in Lancaster, PA and others on the lower Susquehanna made me feel pretty confident that she was pretty successful in collecting data and all different views concerning all of the archaeological sites reported to be "Susquehannock," "Proto-Susquehannock" and otherwise over the past 125 years.

At the end of the time that we had to spend with Jasmine as a part of her overall studies, I had to admit that maybe she WAS as obsessed with the Susquehannocks as I am - and I want to commend her for all of the hard work she did for this research project.

Since then for the past month Jasmine has been finishing up her thesis to defend at on September 30th at Cornell titled, "Analyzing Proto-Susquehannock sites in the Upper Susquehanna River Valley," and this will be the first of what I hope will be many research efforts on our region to come.

On Wednesday September 29th from 6:30 - 7:30pm, we are invited to preview her work on the night before at SRAC which was my only request to her for all that we did to support her efforts this summer. This will be a joint meeting between Triple Cities Chapter of NYSAA, Andaste Chapter of PA Archaeology, and SRAC - and will be free to the public to attend.

Don't miss your chance to see this presentation which is the first comprehensive archaeological report dedicated to the upper Susquehanna River Valley region and the Susquehannock sites found here to date.