Lake George dig site teaches students of prehistoric people
Published 9:48 pm, Friday, May 9, 2014
Each day, Lake George Elementary's school buses roll past the parking lot of the state's Million Dollar Beach on the southern end of the lake, but the students pay it little heed.
After a group of fourth-graders viewed rare 10,000-year-old stone projectile points discovered at an archaeological dig site there and learned about prehistoric Native people who lived on the lake's shore around 8,000 B.C., they'll view the area with a fresh perspective.
"They'll never look at this place the same way again," said fourth-grade teacher Paul Kelly, who led a group of 21 students on Friday's field trip just one-half mile from their school. "This makes a real connection to archaeology and their local history that goes beyond reading a book or studying it online."
"It was really cool to learn about how the Native Americans lived so long ago," said fourth-grader Ryan Quirk.
"It was great to see what archaeologists actually do," said fourth-grader Alex Stranahan, who added that she might consider it as a career.
One archaeologist likened the job to "trying to put together a puzzle where you only have 1 percent of the pieces and you don't know what the picture on the box looks like."
The dig site — dominated by two ancient fire pits used for cooking and heating — was found by accident following ground-penetrating radar testing and 460 small test digs with shovels in advance of a state road improvement project at the Million Dollar Beach parking lot. It's known as a "salvage site" and is mandated by state law to document ancient history prior to a state construction project.
State Museum archaeologists have toiled at the 20-foot-by-20-foot primary dig site since February. They will complete their work next week and cover over the site. Some of the artifacts are on display at the nearby Lake George Visitors Center, but the bulk will be taken back to the State Museum for additional analysis.
The site is near a picnic area behind the parking lot, which long ago was the lake's edge and is now about 300 yards from the sandy beach.
The shoreline was altered with vast amounts of fill and paved over decades ago to create the parking lot.
A couple thousand artifacts found at the dig site — mostly crude stone tools and projectile points used in hunting large game — are not ground-breaking scientifically, but they represent a rich cache that adds to a body of knowledge about early nomadic native people who hunted and trapped plentiful wildlife and fished the lake's productive waters.
These hunters and plant gatherers were living along Lake George more than 5,000 years before ancient Egyptians built the great pyramids during what was known as the Archaic Period in New York state.
"It's very exciting," said state archaeologist Christina Rieth. "It adds to our knowledge of a time period and a people in this area that we don't know much about."
The narrative is highly speculative at this point, but archaeologists believe an extended family of 12 to 20 people lived there. Their hide-covered structures were portable and could be moved quickly to follow deer, caribou and moose. They hunted by hurling wooden spears from a hooked holder, which created a slingshot effect, allowing the weapons to achieve higher velocity and travel greater distances. The spears were fitted with a detachable, retrievable three-pronged stone projectile point, or dart tip. These prehistoric spear-thrower tools are known as atlatl.
"There was definitely a rush of adrenaline when we found them," said project director Steve Moragne, who discovered two of the three 10,000-year-old atlatls. "It's the oldest thing I've ever found by 4,000 years."
The age of artifacts is determined by carbon dating charcoal from the fire pits and matching that to the depth of where artifacts were found. The atlatls were found about four feet deep, in sandy soil where the earliest artifacts were recovered and more than a foot beneath 18th-century artifacts such as shards of ceramic plates, clay pipes, gun flints and British musket balls from the French and Indian War era.
The soil is clearly striated across the millennia: dark brown on top, medium brown in the middle and light gray at bottom.
There was evidence that the site had been reused by subsequent groups of prehistoric native people around 4,000 B.C.
The 18th-century artifacts were surprisingly sparse, despite its proximity to Fort George and Fort William Henry, British forts from the mid-18th century. The archaeologists showed students remnants of a nearby 30-foot-tall lime kiln built with field stones. A diary entry from June 18, 1759, described the first day of operation of the kiln by the Jersey Blues, a British Army fighting unit from New Jersey experienced at heating limestone to create a powdery mortar for construction.
A student asked if kids their age had a lot of chores to do 8,000 years ago.
Rieth said children were expected to work as hard as adults by assisting hunters, gathering fish from nets and rabbits and fox from traps.
The students listened with a stony silence.
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