COVERING THE GAMUT of Prehistory
T h e excavation of the Barton site in northwestern Maryland has yielded artifacts representing thousands of years of human occupation.
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ver the last 20 years, archaeologist Robert Wall and a loose-knit team of professional and amateur researchers have been investigating a floodplain along the North Branch of the Potomac River near Cumberland. Their labor has yielded thousands of artifacts, from crumbling pottery sherds and chert chips to exquisite bone combs and stone pendants. And it has revealed a constellation of settlements— dubbed the Barton complex—along more than a mile of riverbank. The finds have helped archaeologists finetune, and in some cases rethink, their understanding of the region’s human prehistory, which Wall thinks may go back some 12,000 years. But Wall says he’s only scratched Barton’s surface. He believes the site’s unusually deep, undisturbed soils still hold a trove of untold tales about the people who once inhabited the slender valley. “It has a little something from nearly every phase of prehistory,” he says. “That’s what makes it interesting.” And the exploration of this cornfield could even help solve some long-running mysteries, such as why some early inhabitants abruptly disappeared some 400 years ago. Wall isn’t the first archaeologist to be drawn to this rugged wedge of westernmost Maryland, pinched between Pennsylvania’s coal fields to the north and West Virginia’s snaggle-toothed ridges to the south and west. In
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the late 1800s, researchers from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.—150 miles downstream—discovered clay pots and human remains during periodic forays. Decades later, local collectors led other scientists to spots where the collectors had found elegant stone points. But there were still few serious archaeological studies of the region’s prehistory in 1980, when the Maryland Bureau of Mines hired Wall, who was completing his doctorate at the time, to orchestrate a major archaeological survey of areas that could be mined for coal. Over three years, he and his team documented hundreds of prehistoric sites. Not many, however, boasted the thick, loamy soils and sheer density of artifacts he encountered at Barton. “It was already a pretty well-known site, but I did a little bit of surface collecting just to try it out,” the tall, easy-going, 52-year-old archaeologist recalls as he makes his way across the weathered cornstalks that mark the site, a major chunk of which was recently protected by The Archaeological Conservancy. To the untrained eye, there isn’t much to see: the gently sloping terrace sits below a roadside motel, boxed in by a raised highway, railroad tracks, the river, and a small tributary. But the wry and irreverent Wall has a marvelous ability to highlight its hidden qualities. One is a selling point you might hear from a realtor: “This is a really great location, especially if you are living This Clovis point was found by a collector at the site. It’s evidence that the site may have been used some 12,000 years ago.
fall • 2003
BOB WALL/TOWSON UNIVERSITY
B y D a v i d M a l a koff
