At the end of the last ice age, when mammoths and mastodons roamed thick pine forests blanketing the East Coast, some of the first human residents of the Americas made a discovery in what is now Reisterstown: a rare, translucent stone.
Members of the nomadic Clovis people dug into what is now part of the grounds of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Western Run, unearthing chalcedony, a type of quartz. They chipped away at the stones, forming them into arrowheads or spear tips. Then the Clovis people disappeared.
For thousands of years, the earth hid the evidence of these people’s existence. Now, a team led by Zachary Singer, chief terrestrial archaeologist for the Maryland Historical Trust, is preparing to excavate this ancient quarry near the church.
“We tend to think of ourselves as historic” at St. John’s, a congregation formed in 1816, said the rector, the Rev. Thomas Clement. “But we’re a blip in history compared to the age of this quarry.”
Like many great finds, the Piney Grove site was discovered by accident — or, more accurately, after a plethora of traffic accidents.
In 2001, the State Highway Administration embarked on a project to move the intersection of Butler Road and Piney Grove Road to reduce collisions. But before workers started digging up the ground, agency archaeologists were required to inspect the site.
What they found was astonishing: thousands of fragments of stone, ranging from the size of a fist to a fingernail sliver, Singer said. It was clear the bits were not formed by natural forces, but by human hands.
“The way the stone is being chipped into stone tools at the site is very suggestive of early people,” Singer said.
Singer, who fell in love with archaeology while a student at Towson High School, will be giving a talk about the planned dig Thursday evening at the church. He’ll spend a week working on the site next month, and will allow a few volunteers to help with the excavation. Those wishing to watch the team at work also are welcome.
Stone tools, and the chippings left behind when they are made, are some of the only evidence that remains on the East Coast of the Clovis people, Singer said.
The pine trees that dominated the East Coast in their era made the soil acidic, and it dissolved other objects of their daily lives, such as animal hides and sinew, and tools made of wood or bone. Even the bones of the people, and the animals they hunted, vanished into the earth.
Clues to the lives of Clovis people are more easily found in the western states.
The name comes from Clovis, New Mexico, where a young amateur archaeologist found a spear point among mastodon bones in 1929. Anthropologists believe that the Clovis people crossed a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska and then proceeded south into the Americas. Although they were among the first humans to live on this continent, another group arrived about 20,000 years earlier.
Learning about hunter-gatherers from studying stone chippings is a bit like studying modern humans by looking at the sweepings from a factory floor. But archaeologists can glean a lot of information from these fragments.
Singer has recently studied Clovis sites in Cumberland and Seneca Creek State Park in Gaithersburg. The Higgins site, near the Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, also contains Clovis artifacts. Singer said he’s particularly excited about Piney Grove, because the artifacts sit just two feet below the surface and have never been disturbed by a plow, he said.
While previous digs have uncovered jasper tools, made a mere 9,000 years ago, at the site, Singer hopes to find chalcedony blades from the era in which the chippings were made, perhaps an arrowhead that broke and was discarded.
But, of course, there’s no way to know what lies beneath the soil.
“The hard thing with archaeology,” Singer said, “is we never know what we’re going to find.”
