Sometimes science demands quick decisions and rapid mobilization. On other occasions, patience and restraint are in order. At different times in the past 25 years, study of the Paleo Crossing site in Medina County has called for both.
The site has yielded thousands of artifacts from the likely first human inhabitants of northern Ohio. Those finds continue to answer old questions and raise new ones. The latest discovery, by Curator of Archaeology Dr. Brian Redmond and Research Associate Dr. Metin Eren, further cements the site’s reputation as one of the most significant in North America.
The Paleo Crossing site was excavated by the Museum from 1990 to 1993 following the discovery of whole and broken spearheads by a local artifact collector in Sharon Center, west of Copley. Writing for the Museum’s magazine in 1995, former Curator of Archaeology and project director Dr. David Brose recalled, “those spear points were made in a style known as Clovis, and were some of the oldest certain examples of human activity in the New World.”
Clovis refers to the Paleo-Indian culture that spread rapidly across North America, west to east, more than 13,000 years ago. The name comes from stone tools found near Clovis, New Mexico, in the 1920s. Originating in northeast Asia, the Clovis people were the ancestors of most indigenous American populations.
When contacted by Brose, the landowner agreed to grant access to the land and to donate any recovered artifacts to the Museum. It was the start of a long and fruitful relationship.
Digging began the following summer, 1990, and Brose’s eagerness was rewarded. Unlike most of the 200 or so Clovis sites across the continent, this one had some preserved “features”—refuse pits and two post holes. Charcoal recovered from these pits was sent for radiocarbon dating, which determined that humans had occupied the site as far back as 13,000 years ago—making Paleo Crossing one of the oldest sites in Ohio.
But the surprises didn’t stop there. Careful examination showed that most of the stone tools appeared to have been fashioned from chert (or flint) found only in quarries in southern Indiana, 500 kilometers away. That assessment was based on visual comparisons; more conclusive methods weren’t available at the time.
After the last dig in 1993, the Paleo Crossing artifacts collection—numbering more than 10,000 pieces—waited in Museum drawers for researchers with new ideas for teasing out their secrets. In 2000, as a junior in high school, Metin Eren joined the Museum’s summer field program to exercise his early interest in archaeology. Over the next few years “he did a slew of work” with the collection, Redmond says.
Eren went on to Harvard and Exeter, and not long ago earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from Southern Methodist University. Over the years, he and Redmond have collaborated on several papers describing various aspects of the vast stone tool collection. The most recent was published with several colleagues in late 2014 in the Journal of Archaeological Science; it confirmed Brose’s hypothesis on the chert’s origin.
Neutron activation analysis, which can verify the source of stone, is expensive. But Eren is now a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Missouri, which has the necessary facilities. Tests that he arranged proved the chert had been obtained in the Ohio River Valley in Indiana. Their paper notes that this provides “strong inferential material evidence that the fast expansion of the Clovis culture across the continent occurred as a result of a geographically widespread huntergatherer social network.”
Eren adds that the 500 kilometers the chert was carried before it ended up at the Paleo Crossing site is a linear distance; the migrants’ journey was probably much greater. “Huntergatherers don’t travel in straight lines,” he explains. “The least-cost path [or path of least resistance, based on topography] is about 825 kilometers. If they followed rivers, then they may have traveled more than 1,000. It’s one of the longest distances traveled by ancient peoples anywhere in the world.”
As Redmond stresses, “These results demonstrate that the people who lived at Paleo Crossing were among the first to colonize the lower Great Lakes at the close of the Ice Age.”
What brought them here? Redmond speculates that “the Clovis hunters might have been following herds of caribou that moved north as the glaciers receded from this region after the last Ice Age. Caribou would have been rather scarce in the Ohio Valley compared with northern Ohio at this time.”
“Humans are willing to move into unfamiliar territory; we see that all over the world,” Eren says. But this region is unique in the world for sites that “provide insights into this process that is fundamental to our evolution—how we moved into unfamiliar landscapes. You don’t need to go to Africa to study human evolution. You can study it right here.”
Today the Paleo Crossing site is surrounded by houses, but still largely untouched. Redmond says, “There’s little point in further excavation, however, with such a large collection of artifacts already available for research. The focus is now on analysis of the curated specimens.”
Eren says he would like to organize a “refitting” project, reassembling chert fragments into whole tools. This is tedious and timeconsuming work, but would provide further insights into the layout of the camp. Redmond points out that “A similar refitting of artifacts from Noble’s Pond, near Canton, by Kent State University led to the belief that the site was a rendezvous point for Clovis groups from around the region.”
Like Redmond today, Brose also counseled patience and research, rather than endless digging. In 1995 he wrote, “More study is also needed to confirm the sources of the stone used to make tools found at the site and to run additional radiometric tests on materials other than wood charcoal. If all goes according to plan, when archaeologists are ready to use new techniques to address questions about the first human occupation of the region, the Paleo Crossing site will offer up its answers.”
Now, Redmond, Eren and their scientific colleagues appear to have solved the mystery.
This article was published in Explore Member Magazine, Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 2015
