Diving to Prove Indians Lived on the Continental Shelf

ORT HANCOCK, N.J., July 23 — For most underwater archaeologists, the big dream these days is finding a shipwreck full of gold and antique treasures. But for Daria E. Merwin, the goal has a bit less glitter: discovering a 10,000-year-old heap of shells and some ancient arrowheads, spear points and cutting tools in the waters off New Jersey.

Ms. Merwin, a 33-year-old doctoral student in anthropology, says such artifacts would help prove her thesis that prehistoric Indians lived 6,000 to 10,000 years ago on the exposed continental shelf before it was inundated by water from melting glaciers.

For the next three weeks, Ms. Merwin and a dozen undergraduate students in underwater archaeology plan to dive in 30 to 60 feet of water in search of the clues on the Atlantic Ocean floor a few miles off Sandy Hook, N.J. The project is part low-budget exploratory survey, part learning experience for the students and part trailblazing adventure on the ocean bottom.

Ms. Merwin said her budget for the search was $15,000, most of it from the $800 fee each student paid to participate in exchange for six college credits in underwater archaeology. There was not enough money for sonar equipment or other high-tech underwater-sensing devices. So the search will consist of the team's diving from a boat usually chartered by scuba divers, scanning the bottom and excavating up to about a yard deep on any sites that look promising.

Professional archaeologists in New Jersey say the search is both groundbreaking and a long shot.

"They're trying to do something that hasn't been done," said Dr. Lorraine E. Williams, New Jersey's state archaeologist and curator of archaeology at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton. "People for years have tried to figure out how to explore the ocean bottom. Nobody's really come up with clear evidence of prehistoric sites offshore."

Dr. Williams said that bottom currents were strong off Sandy Hook and over thousands of years have no doubt scattered, or buried, any ancient remnants on the continental shelf.

Ms. Merwin agrees that her quest will be difficult. "It's a pilot study," she said. "It's all exploratory." She said she knew of no similar systematic search in the New York region. And she likened the task to finding a prehistoric Indian needle in the haystack of the Atlantic.

But she is undeterred by the long odds. "We know there are sites," she said. "It's just a question of finding them. If we get really lucky, we'll stop looking and concentrate on excavating. It would be something I could work on with students for years and years and years."

New Jersey officials have given Ms. Merwin a permit to search in waters up to three miles offshore. Any artifacts uncovered, she said, will eventually be given to the state museum. In recent days, the team prepared for its offshore search by conducting an underwater archaeological survey here at the site of a ferry dock the National Park Service wants to build for visitors to the Sandy Hook part of the Gateway National Recreation Area.

Ms. Merwin has loved the ocean since childhood in Bayport, on Long Island. In the late 1990's, she said, she worked at a major underwater prehistoric Indian site found by experts at Florida State University beneath the Aucilla River near Tallahassee.

In 2000, she got a master's degree in nautical archaeology from Texas A & M University, which, she said, is one of the few American colleges offering graduate programs in underwater archaeology. She lectures on that subject at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she is studying for her doctorate.

Her thesis is that Indians in the Early Archaic period (10,000 to 8,000 years ago) and the Middle Archaic period (8,000 to 6,000 years ago) were far more prevalent on the now-submerged continental shelf than many archaeologists believe. She said it was widely believed that the ancient Indian population along the coasts of present-day New Jersey and Long Island did not grow profoundly until the Late Archaic period, from 6,000 to 3,000 years ago. "Maybe those changes in the late period aren't so radical and intensive," she said. "The population may have been higher in the early and middle periods, but very few sites have been found because they're submerged."

Hints supporting her theory do exist, experts said. Dr. Williams, the New Jersey state archaeologist, said that for years bones from mastodons that lived on the outer continental shelf have been dredged up by fishermen or washed onto beaches. Presumably, she said, ancient Indians hunted them. But, she added, no preserved underwater Indian settlements or clusters of artifacts have been found — and no one has looked.

Perhaps the most important clue was about 200 arrowheads and other artifacts that a woman from West Long Branch, N.J., Helene Corcione, said she found in 1995 while walking along the beach in Monmouth Beach, a few miles south of Sandy Hook. A few months earlier, the Army Corps of Engineers had rebuilt the beach in Monmouth Beach by pumping sand there from the bottom of the Atlantic about a mile off Sandy Hook.

Ms. Merwin and others say they believe the Corps project dredged up the artifacts. Corps officials say they have no way to verify or disprove that notion.

Dana Linck, the National Park Service's archaeologist for Gateway, is helping Ms. Merwin. He said that tentative tests and analysis on 37 of Ms. Corcione's collection showed they were from the Early Archaic and Late Archaic periods.

John Kraft, an archaeological expert on Lenape Indians in New Jersey, said that submerged sites could exist off New Jersey but that "people like the biggest best — big ships with gold and antiquities."

Ms. Merwin's team is doing what he called dirt archaeology. "What they're looking for are tiny little tools," Mr. Kraft said. "I hope she finds something. It would be great."

Early New World Settlers Rise in East

Bruce Bower
April 15,2000

Virginia, a state perhaps best known for its links to colonial America, contains some of the earliest known remains of prehistoric Americans, according to data presented in Philadelphia last week at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Analyses of soil, plant, and animal remains and stone artifacts that researchers found in layers of a sand dune known as Cactus Hill suggest that people lived there at least 15,000 years ago. That's well before the appearance of the Clovis culture, long regarded as the first in the New World.

Sites from Florida to Alaska have yielded distinctive Clovis stone points. Such finds date at earliest to 11,500 years ago.

"We think people went to Cactus Hill, on and off, beginning at least 15,000 years ago," says Joseph M. McAvoy of Nottoway River Survey-Archaeological Research in Sandstone, Va., who directs research at the site.

Clovis culture may have flourished first in the southeastern United States and then spread westward, McAvoy proposes. However, many archaeologists have assumed that Clovis people crossed into North America from Siberia about 12,000 years ago and then moved eastward.

Excavations at Cactus Hill, which lies along the Nottoway River 45 miles south of Richmond, began in 1993. Wind has carved out this dune and others in the area over the past 25,000 years, McAvoy says. The dune contains enough silt and clay to hold its deposits together.

McAvoy's team identified two sediment layers containing signs of human occupation. The upper level, radiocarbon dated to 10,920 years ago, contained Clovis-style spear points. The lower level, radiocarbon dated to 15,070 years ago, yielded stone points and other implements without Clovis features.

These stone points and blades exhibit microscopic wear marks typical of butchery and hide scraping, reports Larry R. Kimball of Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C. He calls the points "logical precursors" of Clovis points.

Charcoal from the dune's lowest level dates to as early as 19,700 years ago, says McAvoy. That material may have resulted from either human activity or forest fires.

Several lines of evidence lend credence to these dates, McAvoy says. Optically stimulated luminescence dating, a technique for estimating the last exposure of buried soil to sunlight, confirms the site's radiocarbon dates, holds James K. Feathers of the University of Washington in Seattle.

Soil samples from Cactus Hill indicate that no major geological disturbances affected the two archaeological deposits, according to analyses by James C. Baker of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg.

Moreover, artifact-bearing soil at the site contains high concentrations of microscopic plant remains, another sign that the human-occupation levels have remained undisturbed, says Lucinda J. McWeeney of Yale University.

Microscopic studies of soil structure at Cactus Hill, however, suggest that geological forces may have affected the artifact layers, assert Carole A. Mandryk and J. Taylor Perron of Harvard University. "I don't think it's been proved that these artifacts come from undisturbed locations," Mandryk says.

Vance Haynes of the University of Arizona in Tucson also views Cactus Hill cautiously. He awaits further radiocarbon tests before accepting the site's age estimates. Haynes says that it's "most unusual" that only 6 inches of soil separate the two occupation levels and so must cover a span of about 5,000 years.

Still, "Cactus Hill is the best candidate for a pre-Clovis site in a long time," Haynes remarks.

Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., argues that pre-Clovis artifacts at Cactus Hill resemble western European specimens from about the same time. He raises the controversial possibility that seagoing Europeans settled eastern North America and founded the pre-Clovis culture.

Whatever the case, the existence of pre-Clovis folk at Cactus Hill looks convincing, says Michael Johnson, an archaeologist at Fairfax County Park Authority in Falls Church, Va., who's conducting a separate excavation at Cactus Hill.

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