Archaeologist gets to the point at new hospital site

5,000-year-old artifacts from hunter-gatherer bands found, By Vicki Botta wallkill — Investigations making way for a 21st-century hospital have turned up traces of the ancient world. Spear points and other artifacts dating back 5,000 years have turned up at the new Orange Regional Medical Center site in Wallkill. It is a site of such archaeological importance, the state took it to its highest phase of study. Tom Lake, an archaeologist with City/Scape Cultural Resource Consultants, reported his findings before the Incorporated Orange County Chapter of the New York State Archaeological Association, when the chapter met last month in Goshen. Before construction on the new hospital can start, the state requires that archaeological fieldwork be performed as part of a cultural resource study. Spear points spanning the period from the Late Archaic, about 5,000 years ago, to the Early Woodland, about 3,500 years ago, have turned up at the site. Lake said 28 diagnostic spear points were recovered at the site. (Diagnostic points can be specifically tied to a particular culture or period.) The site also appears to be “multi-component,” which means it was home to more than one human occupation over time. The points found at the site, in order of their age from oldest to newest, are: Vosburg, Brewerton, Lamoka, Bare Island, Normanskill, and Perkiomen Broad. These terms refer to the styles of points, which help archaeologists discover the nature of the people who once lived in the place where they are found, and when they lived there. The newfound artifacts suggest that band-sized groups — groups of about 25 to 30 people — visited the site on relatively short stays. The site’s near-total lack of features, such as hearths, charcoal, and fire-cracked rock, indicates the excavated area was probably not a long-term encampment. The presence of utilitarian tools, such as pebble hammerstones, scrapers, ovate knives, point preforms, point tips, microlith tools, cores, and unidentified tool fragments, points to visits by groups with diverse responsibilities, as opposed to small, single-purpose hunting parties. The recoveries during Phase 3 of the study (please see sidebar), mirror those from previous phases, whose tool inventories included side-scrapers, bifacial side-scraper (backed), hammerstones, end scraper, unidentified tool fragments, grinding stone, backed knife, ovate knife, side scraper, knife (microlith), drill (tip), point preform, biface tip, core (Helderberg), projectile point, grooved-notched netsinker, and quartz crystals. An unanswered question, Lake said, concerns the complete absence of Late Woodland materials, both lithic and ceramic: Why did people stop visiting this site after 3,500 years ago? Orange County as time machine “Orange County is an exciting place to conduct archaeology,” said Lake. It is a “time machine” where you can stand on living floors that once held native peoples, where you can visit their quarries, campsites, and workstations, and behold their finest creations in stone tools and ceramics. Human habitation at the famous Dutchess Quarry caves in Goshen dates back 12,000 years, and has produced some of the earliest evidence of human occupation in the Western Hemisphere. The Wallkill River Valley was a magnet for Native Americans beginning at least 11,000 years ago, and continuing until Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries destroyed their culture and drove them away, Lake said. There is good evidence that the Wallkill River Valley was part of a migration conduit with the Mohawk River Valley, which connected western Ontario with northern New Jersey and the Mid-Atlantic region. “I’ve been in love with the prehistoric Hudson Valley since I was a child growing up in Dutchess County,” said Lake. “The idea of Indians living in our midst has had a magical allure for as long as I can remember. There are few feelings in the world like uncovering a 5,000-year-old spear point that has not seen the light of day in five millennia.” Native people believe the spirit of the maker lives on in the tools they made, he said. “I do not know if I’d go that far,” he said, “but you can feel something special in the exquisite craftsmanship of prehistoric stone tools.” He said it was likely women made the pottery, while men made the stone tools. “Every living thing in the Hudson Valley can trace its ancestry to only 18,000 years ago,” Lake said. “Before then, our area was covered with glacial ice nearly two miles thick, moving slowly southwest like a giant snowplow, erasing all evidence of former life. Eventually it wasted away, and in its wake came people like us to live in the tundra, hunt extraordinary animals, and leave behind a thin scattering of evidence of their passing. From 12,000 years ago until the early 17th century, American Indians lived in our backyard. We will journey through 12 millennia of human heritage, hold their world in our hands, and learn how life returned to the Northeast after the Ice Age, and human culture blossomed.” Lake’s most fascinating discovery was an 11,500-year-old mastodon, a now-extinct species, in Hyde Park, Dutchess County. When alive, it was 10 feet high at the shoulder, had tusks 8 feet long, and weighed 10,000 pounds. His next most impressive find was along the Wallkill River — a 10,500-year-old fluted spear point. These are called “Clovis” points (this particular type was a Barnes point), used by the first native people to enter the Hudson Valley 12,000 years ago. These points are very rare. Lake’s company has done many archaeology projects in Orange County over the last several years, from Newburgh and Montgomery to the New Jersey border, skirting the entire Black Dirt area of Goshen and Florida and Pine Island. The Black Dirt is especially intriguing because it is one of the prime areas occupied by the “first people,” off and on, at least 11,000 years ago, Lake said. It was a great swamp at that time, home to a broad range of forage, from fish to waterfowl, from giant elk-moose to the flat-headed peccary. “It must have been like an all-night deli,” he said. Lake teaches anthropology at Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie, including a course on the prehistory of the Hudson Valley. He also works for the New York State Department of Hudson River Estuary Program as its estuary naturalist, where he conducts research, education, and edits The Hudson River Almanac, a natural history journal now in its 14th year. He received his bachelor’s degree at the State University of New York, College at New Paltz, and did his graduate study at the State University of New York at Albany. Lake’s wife, Phyllis, helps when she can with excavating — she found two exquisite 4,000-to-5,000-year-old spear points at the Orange Regional Medical Center site. No delay for hospital Wayne Becker, vice-president of new projects at Orange Regional Medical Center, said the discoveries will in no way affect the hospital’s plans. On Oct. 17 the project received the necessary approval from the State Environmental Quality Review, which includes the cultural study, He said. “This is my opinion — I’m not an archaeologist or anything — but in my opinion [the discoveries] are not really significant,” Becker said. The spear points have all been removed from the site and cataloged, and will handed over to the Town of Wallkill. The New York State Department of Health approved the hospital project in April. Orange Regional proposes to replace its two existing hospitals in Goshen and Middletown with a new facility, the first construction of its kind in the state in more than 25 years, with a total project cost of over $330 million. It is located on 61 acres on East Main Street near the Route 17 and I-84 interchange in the Town of Wallkill. The new building will have seven floors and be over 600,000 square feet, making it the largest hospital between the Tappan Zee Bridge and Albany. Becker said the hospital expects to break ground in late winter or early spring of 2008. Our prehistoric profile The hospital site is, in many ways, typical of other sites Tom Lake’s company has excavated in Orange County. In fact, he said, much of the Hudson Valley has a similar prehistoric profile: • Ice age, 25,000 years ago — Last major ice advance. • Glacial maximum, 21,750 years ago — 10,000 feet of ice over the Northeast. • Deglaciation, 18,000-16,000 years ago — Gradual wasting away of the Laurentide ice sheet. • Glacial Lakes, 16,000-12,000 years ago — Hudson and Albany, life returns to the interior. • Paleoindian (first people), 12,000-10,000 years ago — Major climate changes, Pleistocene mega-fauna extinction. • Archaic, 10,000-3,000 years ago — Mobile hunters and gatherers • Woodland, 1,000 BC to AD 1600 — New technologies: Ceramics, plant domestication, gardening, bow and arrow, villages. • Contact Period, about AD 1600 — European entrada. Indian population declines and disappears. Three phases of digging • Phase 1A: Most archeological fieldwork in the state begins with a literature search conducted at the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historical Preservation at Peebles Island. This phase of work, which takes about a month, determines whether other prehistoric sites were excavated within a several-mile radius of the proposed development. The findings give archaeologists an idea of what to expect when the on-site investigation begins. • Phase 1B: An agreement is made with the state on a sampling protocol to test the area for traces of prehistoric human occupation. This usually is a limited process of digging that also takes, depending upon the size of the area, one month. If no cultural traces are found, the resource assessment ends, a report is written up, and the development goes forward. • Phase 2: If archaeologists find indications of prehistoric human occupation that the state finds compelling, a more elaborate investigation begins. Archaeologists will dig some more, over a broader area. This phase will take about two months, depending upon the size of the area. If the Phase 2 simply confirms the results of Phase 1B, the cultural resource assessment ends, a report is written, and development goes forward. • Phase 3: But if archaeologists find increased indications of significant prehistoric human occupation that the state finds compelling, a Phase 3 is scheduled. A much more elaborate investigation is conducted with considerably more digging, usually over a much broader area. Depending upon the area’s size, this phase may take three months. Orange Regional Medical Center went to a Phase 3.