Dey Armin Site

Excavations at the Dey Armin Site
Brian G. Redmond

The Dey Armin site (33La116) was first recorded in 1979 as a collection of mainly Archaic period artifacts. The site is located in Eastlake, Ohio near to the confluence of Ward Creek and the Chagrin River on a dissected terrace of lake plain sediments. Elevation of the site is 187.5 meters (615 feet) above mean sea level and approximately 12 meters (40 feet) above the level of the Chagrin River. As initially recorded, the Dey Armin site is located on the northern portion of the land form.

In 2001, a team from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History conducted preliminary archaeological investigations on the southern portion of the land form. These investigations initially consisted of the excavation of twenty-one 50 cm by 50 cm test units spread across the property at ten meter intervals. Prehistoric cultural material in the form of chert flakes, pottery sherds, and burned bone fragments were recovered from most of these test units. A map made of the distribution of chert debitage (i.e., stone tool debris) reveals that the highest densities occur in the southeastern portion of the property, near to the terrace edge. Additional testing employed the excavation of five one-meter by one-meter units from which were recovered diagnostic artifacts such as triangular (Madison type) projectile points and thin, grit-tempered pottery. In addition, one small pit feature containing a fragment of a ceramic smoking pipe was discovered. This feature (01-01) provides evidence that the site has been minimally disturbed in modern times and, furthermore, has the potential to contain additional, intact prehistoric cultural deposits.

All of the cultural material recovered from the 2001 investigations appears to date to the Late Prehistoric time period (ca. A.D. 1000 to 1650) and is affiliated with Whittlesey Tradition. Other Whittlesey Tradition sites of significance are known for the immediate area. Just to the west is the Kerniskey site (33La115), a Late Prehistoric period settlement that has been extensively excavated since the early 1980's. Work at the Kerniskey site revealed the remains of several circular, wall trench dwellings and numerous pit features which appear to represent a small village that was occupied sometime between A.D. 1100 and 1300. Less than a mile to the northwest of the Dey Armin site was the Reeves site, a large, fortified Whittlesey Tradition village that was destroyed in the 1960's for a condominium development. These and other sites indicate that the lower Chagrin River Valley was home to a substantial population of Native Americans during several centuries prior to the first European intrusions.

The Department of Archaeology returned to the Dey Armin site in the summer of 2003 to continue excavations of this intriguing site in conjunction with the Archaeology in Action program. The primary goals of this two-week investigation were to establish the boundaries of the site through systematic testing and to recover additional samples of prehistoric cultural material from undisturbed feature contexts. The results of this project will be used to make a preliminary determination of the site’s overall degree of preservation and archaeological significance. It is hoped that the 2003 excavations at the Dey Armin site will help to clarify our understanding of this archaeologically important area of northeast Ohio.

Dey Armin site excavation plan and chert distribution