Submitted by coldrum ---
County archaeologists searching for clues about Native American settlements in what became Anne Arundel County have hit a trove of pottery, arrowheads and perhaps even the remnants of a wigwam near Jug Bay.
The only problem is, they haven't hit their specific target: evidence of the Middle Woodland Period settlement from roughly zero to A.D. 900. Instead, there are plenty of shards of earlier and later settlements, including amazing finds like 10,000-year-old spear points.
"I thought we'd find plenty of it here, but not yet," said Al Luckenbach, county archaeologist. "Just a lot of everything else."
The dig, on property overlooking the Patuxent River near Jug Bay, started when archaeologists and volunteers from the county's Lost Towns Project dug a series of test pits to determine if there was indeed any evidence of prehistoric settlement on the site.
After finding some arrowheads and pottery shards, most decorated with patterns scored in the side of coil-style pots while still wet, wider pits were dug.
One turned up the shells of now locally extinct freshwater clams piled in the corner of the hole right next to what seems to be a fire pit.
"I was thinking we could have a little prehistoric clambake here," Luckenbach quipped.
He said staff from the county's adjacent Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary were excited about the find and contacted a shellfish expert from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who will visit the site to see the white shells herself.
The same pit has yielded other evidence of Indian settlement: a telltale pattern of dark, round spots in the earth, indicative of the saplings stuck into the ground to build a wigwam.
"You see them there, about 6 inches apart," Luckenbach said. But there were two slightly arching rows of the sapling ghosts about a foot apart.
"I can't explain that, yet," he said. "It could mean they returned to the site year after year."
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