Shawnee Minisink Site

New Dates on the Paleoindian Component

Introduction
 

About 27,000 years ago, the effects of the last great glaciation of the Pleistocene period began to occur in the Upper Delaware Valley. Slowly the immense glacier, 410m thick at its maximum, moved down the valley, scouring everything in its path, turning the valley into a barren, U-shaped trough. Then, 15,000 years ago, climatic conditions changed, and a slight Warming trend began to develop.

The glacier stopped its advance just south of what is now called the Delaware Water Gap and began to retreat slowly, leaving behind a barren, icy wasteland. Flora and fauna gradually reentered the valley, struggling in the chilling cold, beset by howling winds blowing off the receding glacier. These tundra conditions lasted until about 13,000 years ago when the preboreal forest appeared.

The preboreal forest consisted of dense stands of spruce-fir and pine that blanketed the entire valley. Warming continued, and a true boreal forest began to establish itself by approximately 10,680 years ago. While warmer than preceding periods, the climate was still much colder than today, and the chill winds from the glacier continued to blow, depositing undulating loess soils.

Paleoindian
The first humans apparently entered the Upper Delaware Valley at about the same time that the boreal forest began to appear. Pine, primarily white, made up 75% of the forest, along with white birch and lesser amounts of cedar and fir. At that time, the Delaware River flowed next to the Shawnee Minisink site, which was located at the juncture of the river and the Brodhead Creek.

In the late summer and early fall, bearers of the Clovis culture camped here for a short time, apparently to procure and process local resources. There was limited tool manufacture but extensive tool use and rejuvenation. Most of the resource procurement and processing seems to have centered around Chenopodium seeds, hawthorn plums, blackberries, Acalypba, and fish, plus other, unknown foodstuffs and materials.

 

Paleoindian end scrapers.

While the distinctive projectile points of these people were rare at the site, endscrapers made of local black flint were especially common, and most of these were hefted. They occur in two major clusters, each containing several different kinds of endscrapers, leading to the conclusion that a rather complex manufacturing process was underway.

Many of the chipping features at this level appear to have been the result of endscraper rejuvenation or replacement. They are usually located on the southern edge of several hearths, indicating a flow of late summer air from the south that blew smoke and heat to the northern edge of the hearths.

 

Small Paleoindian chipping feature.

There were also a variety of other scraping and shredding implements used at Shawnee Minisink. Most commonly, the edge angles of these tools fall in the range of 56-65°, which indicates manufacturing of wooden and bone implements. Next most common are tools with 46-55° working edges, primarily used for skinning, hide scraping, processing sinew and fibers, shredding, heavy bone working, and other similar activities. Narrow cutting edges, wide planing edges, and tools for use on medium density materials are rare in the tool kit recovered at the site.

The available evidence at this time leads to the suggestion that the people inhabiting this camp were subsisting on the floral resources available on the rather open riverbank while using and repairing fishing implements and perhaps harvesting the salmon that return to northern rivers to spawn at this time of year. While the evidence for this conclusion is slim, it is quite clear that the Paleoindians were not primarily hunters but rather foragers, following a seasonal round of food procurement.

Early Early Archaic
The Paleoindian occupation was followed by flood-deposited sand and the continued deposition of loess for some time. Then a massive flooding episode occurred, burying the artifacts under up to a meter or more of sterile sand. Toward the middle or end of the boreal period, which terminated 9211 radiocarbon years ago, another group of humans came to the site. They made a large, notched point whose parallel flaking patterns betray its relationship to other point styles to the West while the notches indicate its kinship to other Early Archaic forms in the East.

The boreal forest, under the influence of a continuing warming trend, had now changed. Oak began to replace birch as the second most common tree. The Delaware River had apparently downcut toward its present channel so that truly massive floods no longer inundated the site.

 

Cores from Paleoindian component.

Materials for stone tools were more varied than in the Paleoindian period, as were the tools themselves. There were more biracial implements, more edges on utilized flakes, more use of cores as heavy tools, and use of tools with smaller edge angles. An entirely new class of implement, the unifacial beveled drill, also appeared. Taken together, the evidence is that the site was serving an entirely different function than it had in the past, the inhabitants concentrating on activities requiring more cutting and drilling.

While the two endscraper concentrations in the Paleoindian zone appear to have had the same tool kit, in the Early Early Archaic different areas had different functions. In addition to the main area around the hearth, which is marked by bifaces, unifaces, and cores, there are two subsidiary areas of concentration, one established primarily by the presence of drills, the other by bifaces and a drill.

While evidence about the life-style of the people responsible for this newly discovered component of the earliest Archaic is slim, it is quite clear that major changes in artifact styles and site functions had taken place. These, however, display a continuity with the past.

Archaic
The warming trend exemplified in the boreal continues and is amplified in the following Atlantic, dated from 9211 to 4610 radiocarbon years ago. The cultures usually called Archaic by American archaeologists lived in and adapted to the beginnings of the deciduous forest of the Northeast. Oak made up about 60% of the trees, hemlock up to 25%, and chestnut appeared in the Upper Delaware Valley. This is a biome with a high carrying capacity, and populations probably increased markedly. A succession of projectile point types indicates that the inhabitants of the valley changed rapidly through time compared to preceding periods.

The primary adaptation appears to have continued to be one of foragers exploiting a narrow range of resources on a seasonal basis. Physalis, or ground-cherry, had become an important floral resource, followed by Cbenopodium and Acalypha. Presumably game and fish were also of importance. The overall impression is one of continuity and adaptation at the local level of what was a rather stable environment over several thousands of years. This adaptation is based on that of the earlier Paleoindian and Early Early Archaic traditions.

Terminal Archaic to Middle Woodland
The cultures in this interval from 4610 to about 2000 radiocarbon years ago occupied the subboreal forest that marked the culmination of the postglacial warming trend. Temperatures were warmer than today; and while the forest was still made up of oak primarily, hickory, elm, linden, and gum appeared. This biome has a large carrying capacity, and populations presumably continued to grow. The cultures that occurred during this time span run the gamut from the extremely late Archaic Lackawaxen through cultures making early attempts at pottery such as those found with the Orient Fishtail point to cultures affected by the Hopewell Interaction Sphere such as the culture making the Brodhead Netmarked pot found at Shawnee Minisink. While there is no secure evidence for horticulture from the Upper Delaware Valley, the pottery alone makes it clear that cultures were becoming more sedentary.

Late Woodland
The last cultures in the Middle Woodland period, such as the one responsible for the Mockley-like sherd found at the site, were already living in the subAtlantic period that continues today in the Upper Delaware Valley. A slight cooling trend saw a decline in hickory and the development of the modern oak-chestnut biome. Hemlock became more common, and spruce returned to the area.

Horticulture was firmly established by the middle of the period, but the gathering of wild floral foods continued, with chenopods retaining their importance, along with Acalypba. Nuts were also of great importance, providing fat to supplement the relatively fatless corn and deer known from ethnographic sources to have been important to the diet.

By the time colonists arrived in the area, semipermanent longhouses up to 20m in length were inhabited by the Minsi, or Munsee, a local group speaking a dialect of the Lenape language. The location of Shawnee Minisink on the ground known locally as Minisink Flats, which is overlooked by the Minisink Hills, is ample attestation, along with the tribal pottery recovered from two features associated with the longhouse, to the validity of this assertion.

 

Fluted projectile point.

The history, then, of the Shawnee Minisink site spans nearly 11,000 years, six geological and climatological periods, and nearly a score of distinct cultures. In its clearly stratified sequence, it has provided an unparalleled view of Pocono prehistory and contributed to shattering a few myths about the continent's earliest inhabitants. Because of this excavation, we have a much clearer picture of the lifeways of early man in both the Upper Delaware Valley in particular and the East in general

These excavations were conducted with the goal of conducting multidisciplinary research designed to gain understanding of Paleoindian lifeways. Ultimately, the site yielded data which indicated the site was occupied as early as 10,590 +/- 300 years ago (radiocarbon dating, W-2994). Other recovered data shows that the site was also occupied subsequent Archaic and Woodland periods.