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A much better article on the same subject submitted by coldrum ---
Jeff Dilyard squatted in a waist-deep pit beneath a rock overhang,
contemplating a dark patch of sand he uncovered. Perhaps it's the
remnants of a campfire an Indian hunting party built more than 10,000 years ago. It was just a few feet away that the retired teacher and
volunteer archaeologist found the base of a Paleo-Indian hunter's
spear point this summer. Excavations such as this one help prove that
the natural rock overhangs that dot Ohio's landscape provided
shelter for hunters dating back more than 12,000 years.
This all makes perfect sense to Nigel Brush. Brush, a geology
professor at Ashland University, has spent 27 years leading
excavations at 30 rock shelters in Ohio, mostly in Holmes and
Coshocton counties. In 1983 he found projectile points from several
prehistoric periods as well as flint flakes beneath a sandstone
outcropping near to his family's farm in Coshocton County. That
indicated people had crafted their weapons there. But how far back did
ancient Indians use these sites? A year later, at another rock shelter
site in northwestern Coshocton County, Brush found his first evidence.
He sent charcoal from a sandstone-lined hearth he uncovered about 3 feet beneath the surface back to UCLA for carbon dating. It was 12,185
years old, making it one of the oldest signs of humans in Ohio. On the
way down, he'd found tools, weapon points, pottery pieces, flint
flakes and animal bone fragments that showed habitation during every
period of prehistory. "We were thinking that as you went down level by level, the use
might change," he said. "Surprisingly, we found the shelters were used
over and over again the same way for thousands of years." Some were
base camps that might have been used for months. He finds thousands of
flint chips, bone fragments and other signs of long-term habitation in
those. Others appear to have hunting camps, used for a few weeks at a
time with fires and smaller flint flakes that showed that the Indians
finished points there, but did their primary knapping somewhere else.
Still others appear to have been inhabited intermittently, some for a
night or two, others for a few hours as shelter from a storm and still
others for a few minutes as a place to stash a piece of flint or a pot
for later use. They're usually the smallest and show the fewest signs
of habitation.
Jeff Dilyard's find helped link some of the clues. Dilyard, a
volunteer for 24 years, is a member of a consortium of geologists and
archaeologists from Ashland, Wooster and Columbus. Last month he had
worked his way down to what appeared to be an unpromising layer of
sand on the last excavation before Brush was going to start compiling
his research for a book. He was going to quit there when he found it:
a chip of brown flint. The flint piece was worked into a concave arc
on one side and was broken off flat on the opposite. It has vertical
grooves, or flutes, worked into it. Dilyard knew it was old. But he
didn't know just how old until experts had a look at it.The tips,
Brush said, all look pretty much the same. It's the base of a flint
spear point that tells archaeologists who made it. But those vertical
flutes tell them that Paleo-Indians made the one Dilyard dug up in
Coshocton County. Brad Lepper, an archaeologist with the Ohio
Historical Society, examined the find. He said the point likely is
older than 10,000 years.
For more, see the Columbus Dispatch.
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