This week our journey by county
through the archaeology of Pennsylvania takes us to eastern Pennsylvania and Lehigh
County. This county is mainly situated in the Great Valley section of the Ridge
and Valley province with a small section of the New England province in the
southern part of the county. The Lehigh River is the main drainage that
eventually empties into the Delaware River. The major streams are the Little
Lehigh and Jordan creeks. The Great Valley zone is largely a rolling terrain
with small streams. This is reflected in
site locations with only 40% of the sites in riverine settings. The main lithic
resource is jasper with 34% of the sites producing artifacts of that material. Chert
is the second most common toolstone with 30% of the sites producing that
material. Both jasper and chert are found in local bedrock formations.
The county has a moderate density of
archaeological sites but only a few have been tested and these generally were
surface collections rather than deep excavations. The largest excavations and
most extensive research has been conducted at the jasper quarries and their associated
workshop areas. Jasper is a micro-cryptocrystalline rock with a high silica
content. It is a type of chert that contains small amounts of iron that gives
it a brown or yellow color. Jasper turns red when exposed to heat but is
usually not found that way naturally. Less commonly found examples are black or
green. The jaspers of eastern Pennsylvania are located in the Reading Prong
section of the New England Province and they are associated with the Hardyston
formation which mainly consists of sandstone and quartzites. They are found at the contact between the Hardyston quartzite
and the adjacent schist formation. In the Reading Prong, jasper is actually a
sedimentary rock formed by a process called replacement. Over millions of
years, silica from the Hardyston formation precipitated into voids in the schist
forming large pockets of jasper.
Fluted points made of jasper
Jasper is an easily flaked toolstone
with a very durable edge. It was extensively used by the prehistoric peoples of
the region, as early as the Paleoindian period, over 11,000 years ago. Twenty-five
percent of all fluted points in Pennsylvania are made of this mateial. The Transitional period (4,300-2,700 years
ago) probably experienced the most intensive use of this material, especially
in the production of Lehigh and Perkiomen broadspears, scrapers, drills and
other tools. During this time it was also traded throughout the Middle Atlantic
region, from Virginia to Vermont.
Jasper broadspears
In 1891 and 1892, Henry Mercer (1894)
conducted the initial investigations of the Hardyston formation and documented ten
jasper quarries in Lehigh (6), Berks (3) and Bucks counties (1). He focused his work on the largest quarries
located near the communities of Vera Cruz and Macungie in Lehigh County. Here, he found these sites littered with
layers of jasper flakes and the landscape pock-marked with 60 to over 100
prehistoric mining pits over areas of six to ten acres. Roland Hill reported in 1938 that the 140
pits at Vera Cruz, were from ten to thirty-five feet deep and ten to one
hundred feet across. Mercer and some of his informants tested several of these
to depths in excess of 30 feet and concluded that the prehistoric miners first
removed jasper in near-surface context and then, as needed, began to dig
deeper, gradually enlarging the excavations outward and downward. One of his
informants reported putting shafts to 40 feet in a crater with a 100-foot
diameter. At several sites, they found stone diggings tools buried in the pits.
Mercer’s maps and publications introduced these sites into the archaeological
literature and represented the foremost work on the quarries for nearly a
century.
Quarry profile - notice the sloping layers of
jasper flakes.
In the
1980’s, Professor James W. Hatch of the Pennsylvania State University conducted
extensive surveys of the region in advance of the I-78 highway project. He
documented numerous quarries and quarry related workshop areas. Anthony and
Roberts (1988) followed up on this work and developed the Hardyston Jasper
Prehistoric Archaeological District. Anthony and Roberts (1988) tested numerous
workshop sites but none of the actual quarries. The district includes both
quarry and non-quarry related sites and is identified by sites with
predominantly jasper artifacts. Spanning
a great deal of time, it includes sites from Paleoindian through Late Woodland
times tracing the changing use of jasper mining and tool technology. The
Hardyston Jasper Prehistoric Archaeological District serves as a historic
preservation management tool for this important resource.
James Hatch continued his research on
the quarries and related workshop sites in the 1980’s and 90’s. Hatch was
concerned with documenting how the quarries were used, the distribution of the
mined jasper, and developing sourcing signatures. Chemically, he mapped six of these quarries
in detail: Vera Cruz, Mast Farm, King’s, Urffer’ Farm, Lyons and Longswamp (the
latter two are in Berks county). He could not map Macungie, Leinbach’s Mills,
Frankenfield or Durham due to 20th century development. He conducted limited
controlled surface collections at Vera Cruz, Lyons and Kings quarries and, at
Vera Cruz, he hand-excavated quarry pits
and mapped deep backhoe profiles through some of the pits.
His work at Vera
Cruz was especially instrumental in documenting the overlapping sequence of
pits used by Native Americans to extract the jasper. At the quarry, once the
blocks of high quality material were exposed, the low grade cortex was removed
and other impurities were flaked away. Generally, the blocks were reduced to a
transportable size. Some tools were finished at the quarry but most of this
work was accomplished elsewhere. There are numerous workshop sites around the
quarries documenting the final production of jasper stone tools.
The work undertaken
by the PHMC at the King’s quarry site (36Lh2) in 2002 added to our
understanding of the prehistoric mining process. After conducting two
controlled surface collections, recovering over 50,000 artifacts, a backhoe was
used to cut a profile through the quarry pits. Here, an 85 foot wide, 23 foot
deep pit was uncovered with several smaller pits located along the parameter.
This confirmed Hatch’s work, although the King’s quarry pit was nearly three
times the size of anything at Vera Cruz. Carbon 14 dates were obtained from the
Kings quarry excavation and the investigators were able to date the various
stages of infilling. Based on these dates, the maximum depth was probably
reached during the Transitional period and the pit began to naturally backfill in
stages up through the Late Woodland period.
.
Large
Profile of Vera Cruz
Hatch’s most significant contribution
was the “sourcing” research he conducted with Adam King and Barry Sheetz of the
Material Science Laboratory at Penn State. Jasper is found as artifacts from
New England to North Carolina. Major
quarries are located near State College in central Pennsylvania; in the
northern Shenandoah Valley of Virginia; in northern Delaware as well as eastern
Pennsylvania. There are some visual differences between the material from these
quarries but they are all similar in appearance. In order to better understand
trading patterns and to define territorial boundaries, it is important to know
which quarry produced the artifacts from a particular site. Using geochemical analyses,
such as neutron activation and X-ray Fluorescence spectroscopy to detect trace
elements within the jasper, Hatch and colleagues were able to distinguish each
of the main quarry areas from one another, but not the individual quarries
within the entire Reading Prong. Contrary to popular opinion among
archaeologists, his results showed that the Reading Prong jasper was not
regularly moving outside the Middle Atlantic region to New England or the
Southeast. The material from these four quarries rarely moved more than 200
miles. In addition, he found that many of the artifact samples he tested did
not originate from the four main quarry areas, suggesting there were additional
sources that have yet to be discovered.
Finally, James
Miller reported the quarry sites rarely produce any pottery. We checked our
files and there is only one recorded pottery shard in the collection of the
State Museum and based on the GIS files, there is only one site (36Lh19) in the
county that has produced pottery (Late Woodland). There are many possible
explanations but it is curious that Woodland habitation sites seem to be rare
in an area so rich in lithic sources.
In a letter
to the editor of the Pennsylvania Archaeologist (1938), Roland B. Hill felt
these quarries were so important that the state or federal government should
restore and preserve the Vera Cruz quarry. That did not happen but Lehigh
county purchased several acres and it is open to the public today.
We hope you have enjoyed this glimpse
into the archaeological heritage of Lehigh County. Hopefully it will inspire
you to seek such publications as Indian
Jasper Quarries in the Lehigh Hills by Mercer or any of the journal
articles on archaeology conducted in Lehigh County and published in Pennsylvania Archaeologist. Understanding and exploring our
archaeological heritage is pivotal to our understanding of human behavior and
our ability to change and adapt over time- just as the peoples of Lehigh County
have done for thousands of years.
Bibliography
Hill, James S.
1954 Jasper Quarries of Macungie Pennsylvania
Archaeologist 24(1) 20-21.
Hill, Roland B.
1938 A Visit to the Jasper Quarries. Pennsylvania Archaeologist 8(1):
65-66.
Mercer, Henry C.
1894 Indian Jasper Mines in the Lehigh Hills. American Anthropologist
24(1):20-21.
For more information, visit PAarchaeology.state.pa.us or the Hall of Anthropology and Archaeology at The State Museum of Pennsylvania .
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