Happy New Year!

I just wanted to write a quick note to all of you to wish you a Happy New Year.

I don't know about you - but I feel as if 2008 will be a year that not only we will remember, but that will be remembered as a part of our local history.

The things that we are doing today remind me of 100 years ago when Louise Welles Murray, her family, and a handful of people to include a young man whom she knew had incredible talent, named Ellsworth Cowles set forth to preserve our local history for our community, and the region. One hundred years ago - Louise (in 1908) published her incredible work - "Old Tioga Point and Early Athens," and would many times over the following decades of her life be quoted saying, "The artifacts need to stay here."
Unfortunately, her words were not heard by all the ears that could facilitate her wishes, but they do echo ever so loudly at least in ours 100 years later.

While our community may feel we are embarking on a new journey, we are picking up where Louise, her family and Mr. Ellsworth Cowles and others left off. Admittedly, we have moved past the idea of only housing artifacts in a museum setting, but I believe that Louise herself would have continued to grow and would have re-aligned her "museum" mentality into what we are now building on Broad Street in Waverly...All that I mean by this is that I believe that Louise, her family, and even Ellsworth Cowles would have been proud to see what we are setting forth to do.

Like us, they understood just how rich our region's local archaeology is and how important it is to continue to preserve it, research it and to educate our region about it.


It has been over a century since Louise's family found the pottery shown above in their garden. Yet, I can proudly report that the energy, passion, and the synergy that was surrounding this effort 100 years ago is still alive and well in the form of a group of incredible people who have formed what we have for SRAC.

Thank you for all you have done to keep the candle burning - - I look forward to working with you in 2008!

deb

SRAC Workshop - Saturday January 5th!

First - Thanks to Inga Welles, Tom Valilee, Duane Welles, and Susan Fogel for joining me in moving the last donated items from the Albro House today! We were able to get the job done in no time and managed to have a few laughs together as usual - (right DUANE?)

We are ready to start working on the front area space this Saturday to get it ready for our gift shop/ visitor center. This will take several workshops, and we will continue on this project every Saturday until we are ready to open our doors!

Work will include painting, small construction work, and cleaning. Just tell us what you want to do and we will be happy to oblige!

Seriously, we hope that you will find the time to stop in and help us for an hour or two. We will be working from 10am - 2pm at 345 Broad Street Waverly, NY.

Call 607-565-2536 if you need more information or have questions.

Hope to see you there!

Another Local Collection

Well Ted Keir and I were on the road again today at lunch time and we traveled to a local collector's house to see his collection by invitation. Though I am not at liberty to discuss the person's name or specific site location, I think you will be intrigued at what he found surface hunting throughout his life at this one site within a 15 mile distance of our location in Waverly, NY. While he had many points and working tools, I wanted to share a few of the rarer items that span thousands of years for this particular site in hopes that we can get some feedback on them.

Please "Post a comment" to add your feedback or thoughts on any of these items!

First, I wanted to show you this trade pipe that I have not personally ever seen, and was told by the collector that the NYS Museum has one to match and that it is a red clay Dutch trade pipe with a rabbit face...if any one has more clear information about this or any other thoughts - I would love to know it...

Then he also had a very neat rock with a simple face carved into it: (It was not marked at all on the other side...)


And - then there was the strange polished pod-like slate small bowl(?): (several different angles of the same artifact below...)

Lastly, how about two birdstones in GREAT condition (one popeyed!) for the grand finale?

Actually the collector said that he had been dragging logs on this area of the site when he noticed the green slate birstone (in back in image below) on the ground, and still can't believe that it was in one piece when he found it!


Note the notching on the nose of the red popeyed birdstone - -I wonder if that has some significance?

The story does not end there though....

You see this collector was offered $500 just for one of the birdstones by someone out of state.

In fact Hess's auction house is just a short distance away...and he knows he can make alot of money if he takes his collection up there...

You see, to me, if you break up the collection from this site or people take them out of area, they are just erasing more of the evidence of the people who lived here...Furthermore, if he takes it to a museum hundreds of miles away, how can we as a community celebrate this incredibly rich prehistoric and early historic past?

The Susquehanna River Archaeological Center (SRAC) is dedicated to education, research and preservation of the region's Native American archaeological, cultural and historical assets for the communities within the Twin Tier Region of Southeastern NY and Northeastern PA, and we will compile and share all of our records for any research on the region!

Lastly I believe this is a VERY GOOD example of why SRAC was founded, because I believe that as my hero, Louise Welles Murray said 100 years ago, "the artifacts need to stay here," not for MY sake...but for the sake of many generations to come to know what we know.

But then I am no collector, so I cannot say what I would do if I was contemplating getting rid of these incredible specimens- - or need for money - - and this is just one of many collections in the region, so what could it hurt - - RIGHT?

-- so I ask YOU - - - -

"What do you think someone like him should do?"

Please "Post a comment" to add your feedback or thoughts

Conservation and The Adena Mound Builder Culture

A few years ago, Ted Keir and I met with a representative of the Archaeological Conservancy. The Archaeological Conservancy was established in 1980, and is the only national non-profit organization dedicated to acquiring and preserving the best of our nation's remaining archaeological sites. Based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the Conservancy also operates regional offices in Mississippi, Maryland, Ohio, and California. We met with them about trying to preserve the Queen Esther's Town and Flats area and to stop the "pay for digging" of this incredibly significant site that reportedly was and still is going on there under a business name of "Camp Dig It."
Our hope was that they would buy the land in question or that they would pay the owner for rights to the land and have an easement placed on it defining what the land could be used for. While the preservation effort did not in the end occur, it was my introduction to what an incredible organization the Archaeological Conservancy is. It was also my reality check that sometimes it would be better to have a local organization in place to build awareness about the need for preservation and was indeed another reason why SRAC was formed...

Why I bring this up now is that for Christmas, I received a subscription to the Archaeological Conservancy magazine, "American Archaeology," and as I initially leafed through the pages with incredible pictures of sites around our country, I stopped dead on page 31 when I saw the image of a familiar artifact:


Many of you know the artifact that I am referring to is SRAC's birdstone that we use in all of our branding efforts. SRAC Board member Dick Cowles's dad Ellsworth Cowles had it in his collection at one time. It was found at the Shepard Hills Golf Course (just north of Spanish Hill) it was uncovered by some workers while digging up a sand trap about 80 years ago :

For those that are not familiar with birdstones, they were thought to be an atlatl weight, and actually came in many different designs. The most unique are those shown above, called the "popeyed" birdstone.

The article from the Archaeological Conservancy reports that their popeyed birdstone was found in 2006 at the Danbury site in northern Ohio on the edge of Lake Erie, and goes on to report that the "burial which was dated to the Early Woodland period, (approximately 1200–500 B.C~ Twigg:2007) contained three individuals and a range of artifacts including a birdstone carved from gray slate(shown above)...the presence of these objects suggest a level of ritual that is rare for early woodland sites"(American Archaeology:2007)

Because the burial where the birdstone was found in Waverly was not recorded that I know of, or dated for that matter, I guess I somehow just thought that the birdstone that was found there was from a much later Mound Builder culture...but the Danbury article dates the popeyed birdstone found at their site as Early Woodland(approximately 1200–500 B.C~ Twigg:2007)...which would by my calculations make the culture most likely the earliest of the Mound Builders...the Adena.

Please note that popeyed birdstones are said to be more frequently found in Late Archaic sites, as opposed to Early Woodland sites. But I think the point here is that they were used at the point of a "renaissance period "of a very early kind. That is that they are found at sites of a people who were nearing the end of the "hunting and gathering" mode of life and began early agricultural efforts, made basic pottery, built living structures and spent what seems to be alot of time with ritualistic pursuits. Specifically, the Adena are most well noted because of their great "rounded pyramid-shaped" or conical burial mounds.

Picture from my trip to the Miamisburg (Adena) Mound, Ohio

The mounds have been found as far east as the Atlantic shores and as far west as the Mississippi. (The great Miamisburg Mound (shown above) in Miamisburg, Ohio is worth the visit by the way...)

We actually have more than a small amount of locally found Adena points in our SRAC collection that we have identified already, and let's not forget that the Adena were also great users of red ochre (ocher) ...

It would seem that even though we have no evidence of large conical mounds left in our immediate area, that the evidence in the form of artifacts that we can easily muster shows quite convincingly that the Adena culture was in fact in our region.

I hope that you can see that we at SRAC are continuing to compile this evidence in our collections for the very purpose of allowing these types of trends to be available to researchers and students of our local prehistory. The truth is that along with the The Archaeological Conservancy many states and communities are finally taking ownership AND RESPONSIBILITY and are currently preserving sites and finally celebrating and sharing just these types of stories about the early people who lived in their areas.

I think it is about time we do the same.

Lastly, special thanks to Katie Fogel for a very thoughtful and thought provoking Christmas present!

Ted Keir Presents at Lockheed Martin, Owego, NY

Ted and I visited Lockheed Martin earlier this month and I wanted to share the video of all that Ted shared that day. Not only did he share information about many incredible artifacts that he personally found in the region, but he also shared his incredible knowledge of our local prehistory and archaeology.

Just click the following image to go to the video page which should begin playing as fast as the "Youtube" videos I know you watch!


Or you can use the following URL: http://www.sracenter.org/clips/Ted_Lockheed.asp

SRAC Receives an Early Christmas Present!

SRAC is proud to announce that the Robert K. Fox Collection has been added to the SRAC collection.

Bob Fox was a collector in the region surrounding Athens, PA for most of his life, and up until his recent death was proud to show the evidence of this region that he himself had found and recorded.

When we were asked to visit the Fox home and collection recently, board members Ted Keir, Tom Vallilee and I all were pleasantly surprised to see that Bob had placed a number on literally all of the artifacts that he had found over the decades. These numbers are listed in a little notebook that shows each number relating to a specific site or location where that artifact was found. If memory serves me right, Bob had around 30 - some sites recorded.

This puts Bob's collection at a very important place in our collection, because it can without a doubt be useful to researchers to know what was found at these sites in our region.

This collection is also a wonderful message to SRAC that the word is getting out about what we are trying to do. That is - to not put our evidence on the auction block and instead to preserve it for the sake of our community and furthering research about our prehistoric past.



The Fox Collection - (which it will be known as from this point on at SRAC) is the fifth donation of evidence that we have received. The first of which was by our co-founder Mr. Dick Cowles of thousands of artifacts (evidence) that belonged to his father, Ellsworth Cowles that covers sites around Waverly, NY, Spanish Hill, Athens, PA, Big Flats, even Corning. The second was the Bernard Safford Collection, from Waverly, NY but includes hundreds of artifacts from sites located in Sheshequin, PA and Ithaca, NY which we have used in schools around the region and at many events for kids per his wishes. The third was the Sloat Collection which includes evidence from a specific site in Milltown, PA. The fourth was the Les Rolfe Collection, which includes an authentic Birch Bark canoe as well as 250 framed Vestal Points, and some miscellaneous artifacts from a PA site. As you can see, we are again honored to receive yet another incredible local collection - the Bob Fox collection which is a wonderful addition to our materials.


I want to personally thank Randy Pettit and all of Bob Fox's relatives who made the decision to donate the evidence to SRAC. We are honored to receive the gift and take the stewardship of the evidence you have entrusted to us very seriously.

Make no mistake -
We hope that our local collectors continue to fieldwalk and enjoy their collections. Without them, we would have very little evidence of our Native Indian past left in our community. All we ask is that they consider planning ahead. As many of you already know, many of our local collections have been lost in the past by ending up at auction houses at which point the evidence was lost forever.

SRAC was founded for this very purpose - to allow our private collectors a place where their collections can be housed in their name forever when they are ready to consider a new home for them at some point. If something should happen and they have not, we ask that the family consider their loved ones life's work as a wonderful way to have them remembered in their community, as well as a way to preserve evidence of our region's past.

We at SRAC believe it is OUR history. Without our local collectors and philanthropists, SRAC would not have been founded nor been able to have the successes it has to date.

Thank you to all who have given to SRAC in whatever form was possible. We take it as a vote of confidence, and will continue to work hard to continue to be deserving of it.

The Mound Builder Myth

Many of you know about my personal interest in Spanish Hill and my studies in the mound builder cultures that preceded the Iroquois and other historic cultures we mostly hear about today. I believe this story is a great illustration of how much we have learned over the past century, as well as how much theories can change over time and with more and more great minds working through the issues...Remember that the name of this article is "The Mound Builder MYTH..." it is called this after a real myth that was alive and well up until just a few decades ago...

The following is an excerpt from the book "History of Waverly, New York" (Albertson:1943) and it shows just how much we did not understand about the people who lived here just a few hundred years before us...

I find it really strange that our continent just like South America had such great civilizations and structures like those of the Mayans and the Incas and so on, yet we for hundreds of years claimed they were created by someone other than the Native Indians that they found here...And just like the South Americans, there were many groups who practiced making mounds and mound structures and they were not all the same people that could ever be characterized as one group called the "Mound Builders."

Some of the actual yet today laughable scientific explanations for who the Mound Builders REALLY were were:

• The Lost Israelites
• People of Atlantis
• Prince Madoc's descendants
• Vikings

Did you notice these were all "White People"?

Anyway - the good news is that it is commonly accepted now that the ancestors of the Native Indians now known as "Iroquois" and "Cherokee" and even "Winnebagos" (Ho-Chunk) were some of the descendants of the people who once built mounds to facilitate their religious, political, and social structures and way of life.

Another earlier misunderstanding that still exists today in the minds of many students of local history and archaeology is WHERE these mounds were found. The following is an excerpt from E.G. Squier, Ancient Monuments of New York.

Below is a map that is the result of a study sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute and compiled by Cyrus Thomas in 1891. Each orange dot represents an ancient earthwork that existed or was recorded in 1891 for this huge piece of work done in order to preserve the information about them before they were totally annihilated...and one of these works was Spanish Hill in South Waverly, PA.

You can also see by this map and the number of dots on it that the idea that the Native Indians always lived in small groups and had no cities or great trade or cultural centers, etc is simply not true.

In fact - I can show you several of these incredible earthworks that still exist - right now:

• Conical (Adena) Mounds
• Geometric (Hopewell) Mounds
• Effigy (Fort Ancient) Mounds
• Temple (Mississipian) Mounds

If you prefer to just watch videos - - you can pick them out from my SpanishHill.com video page.

As you can see - we have been doing a lot of work that has taken us far outside our region, to learn more about our own region.

On the other hand, we have found several caches of Flint Ridge, Ohio "trade blades" right in our region, these shown below were part of a cache of 127 blades plowed up in Erwin, NY around 1850. It is thought that these were a buried "stash" of an ancient tradesman who hid the bulk of his wares in order to keep his load light, but accessible when a deal was made nearby.


We believe that examples such as these shows that the western branch of the Susquehanna was not the only route used by the ancients to live, travel and trade by...and that in fact just as Squier had noted above, that they traveled as far east as the country of the Onnondaga and as far south as the Valley of Wyoming - - which would place them in our region of the Twin Tiers of Southern NY and Northern PA...in other words - right here.

The overwhelming amount of evidence that SRAC already has in their collections shows that people entered our region THOUSANDS of years ago, and that it was a place that was used by many cultures until it was controlled by the great Susquehannocks (who were later pushed southward by the Iroquois) at the time the white man first appeared on the scene.

Right now we are not sure who are responsible for the great embankments that enclosed ten acres atop Spanish Hill, or for many other earthworks to include those found just outside Elmira, NY...But we at SRAC believe that we can be part of the TRUTH that still alludes us... and that we are getting closer every day...

By storing up what is left of our local collections and housing them here for our communities and other researchers to learn from, we believe that we can support the continuation of research and education about our early prehistory that is yet to be solved conclusively, while celebrating the rich heritage that exists here. To read more about the Mound Builder Myth and the earthworks found east of the Mississippi, click here. To see some of the artifacts found in our region, click here.

What I am saying is that we are at an important place in our history right now that will affect generations to come in how they understand our region's past. I wish I could get you to turn off the reality shows for a while folks and join SRAC in an incredibly interesting and exciting quest of our own that is alot more fulfilling than being a couch potato.

The fact is that we are not just preserving history - we have the opportunity to make it ~ and all you have to do to be a part of it is to click here.



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