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Rock Creek Park
District of Columbia
NATIONAL
PARK
SERVICE
Ancient Native Americans
in Rock Creek Park
National Park Service
U.S. Department of the Interior
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
LIBRARIES
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
NOV
3 9015 08543 4358
DEPOSII ODY
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
SԴՈԼՈՐ
COLLECTION
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Ancient Native Americans in Rock Creek Park
became available to archeologists
after 1948, and it requires organic
samples, preferably charcoal. As
archeologists have tried to figure
Native Americans have roamed the
hills around Rock Creek and the falls
of the Potomac for at least the past
10,000 years. However, for much of
that time they do not seem to have
stayed long. The only traces they left
of their presence are a few lost
spearpoints. Americans of that
distant era were hunter-gatherers
who roamed widely through the
landscape in search of food, stone
for tools, and other resources.
People first made longer stays in the
park about 4,500 years ago, in what
archeologists call the Late Archaic
period. About that time, people
began to quarry stone from cobble
beds along Rock Creek. They also
began to spend more time around
the Little Falls of the Potomac,
where large archeological sites were
noticed as long ago as the 1870s.
Finds of spearpoints, arrowheads,
grinding stones, potsherds, and
other artifacts show that after 2500
BC, Native Americans often passed
through and camped in the park.
By studying the objects they left
behind, archeologists have learned
much about their lives.
Most of the cobbles are a very
tough kind of stone known as
quartzite. Quartzite was seldom
used in earlier times, but around
4,500 years ago the Native
American residents of coastal
Virginia and Maryland preferred it
for making a kind of wide, heavy
spearpoint we call the Savannah
River broadspear. Huge numbers of
quartzite cobbles were taken from
these hillsides and chipped into
roughly oval "blanks" or
performs." The roughly shaped
stones were carried to campsites
nearby, where they were shaped
into finished tools. The quarry sites
are covered with millions of
fragments of waste stone and many
thousands of cobbles that were
tested and then discarded.
archeology. They were
men dug trenches
studied intensively by
along the hillsides
William Henry Holmes of
where the cobble beds
the Bureau of American
are exposed, showing
Ethnology between 1889
that in some places the
and 1894. The rough,
debris left by ancient
oval preforms from the
quarrying is five feet
quarries look something
thick. Some of the
like the ancient Acheulian
quarries Holmes studied
handaxes of Europe,
have been destroyed by
made between 500,000
the expanding city of
and 100,000 years ago.
a Nolla
Washington, but others
Before Holmes's research,
remain intact in Rock
some American
William Henry Holmes.
Creek Park. They were
archeologists saw
explored by
similarities between the
archeologists in 2004.
local preforms and European sites Among the recent finds are whole
and thought that people must have and broken turtleback cores at
lived in North America in Acheulian various stages of completion, as well
times. Holmes worked out how a as half of a large, crude axe,
cobble was chipped into a finished possibly used as a quarrying tool.
spearpoint, and showed that what Some evidence of tool making was
were said to be ancient hand axes also found, including the tip of a
were actually only the middle stages nearly finished spearpoint.
of this tool-making process.
Archeologists are not certain when
or for how long the quartzite
quarries were used. Holmes did not
find any finished spearpoints in his
excavations (which could be
dated by their distinctive
style), nor have any been
found at the sites since. The
best clue is the material of
the stones. Quartzite was
used for stone tools at many
times in the past, but only
the Savannah River people
used so much of it that they
would have needed these
enormous quarries. Most
likely, then, the quarries
were used from about 2200
to 1700 BC. Those dates
come from radiocarbon
dating of fireplaces found
near Savannah River
spearpoints on other sites.
Radiocarbon dating only
o
2in.
4in.
50mm
100mm
The quartzite quarries within the
Rock Creek valley have an important
place in the history of American
Broken Stone Axe found in one of the Rock Creek Quarries.
QUARRY FACE
GREAT SHOP DEPOSIT
out the date of the quarries, they
are teased by this item in Holmes's
account of his work:
The Quarries
Holmes's
excavations
at the Rock
Creek
quarries
represented
the state of
the art in late
nineteenth-
century
archeology,
and it would
be difficult
even today
to improve
a
In one of the side trenches a good
deal of charcoal was found, and at
the depth of about 6 feet a charred
log more than 10 feet long and in
places a foot in diameter was
encountered.
D
“s
On some of the bluffs overlooking
Rock Creek and the small streams
that feed it, thousands of cobbles
peek through the dead leaves on
the ground. These stones may not
look like much, but they are the
remnants of a prehistoric industry
where ancient Indians once made
hundreds of thousands of stone
tools.
да
800
á
Not knowing that radiocarbon
dating would one day be invented,
Holmes saved none of this charcoal,
and we are left to wonder if our
guess about the date of the quarries
is correct.
0
2in.
4in.
=
upon his
techniques or
reporting. His
50mm
100mm
SECTION SHOWING THE IRREGULAR QUARRY FACE, THE BOWLDER BEDS AT THE RIGHT AND A DEPOSIT OF SHOP REFUSE AT THE LEFT
Rough Stone "Bifaces" Quarried from the Banks of Rock Creek around 2200 BC.
Drawing of the Profile of one of Holmes Excavation Trenches.

Ancient Native Americans in Rock Creek Park
The Whitehurst Freeway Sites
burial reminds us that Indians were great
travelers and that whole Indian peoples
sometimes moved hundreds of miles in
search of new homes.
thousands of artifacts. In one 3x3-foot test
unit they found 24 spearpoints or knives,
182 potsherds, and 1,673 other artifacts
(mostly waste flakes from making stone
tools). The sites along this stream were
used over a period of about 4,000 years,
from about 2500 BC to AD 1500.
Due
The Palisades
remains of an adult, probably a 30- to 40-
year-old woman. Her scattered bone
fragments had been placed in a shallow pit
measuring about two feet across. Along
with the bones were a comb carved from
antler; two stone pendants; a carved
sandstone phallus; a triangular knife; 14
great white shark teeth, 12 fossilized and
two apparently recent; a bone from a large
bird; six antler disks; a wooden bead; and
cloth woven of fibers from pawpaw and
grass. Radiocarbon dates put this burial at
AD 640-790.
At the mouth of Rock Creek, the
Whitehurst Freeway ends in a tangle of
ramps and embankments. This does not
seem like a likely place to find a Native
American camp site; if you imagine the
highway under construction, with cranes,
backhoes, and other heavy equipment
tearing up the ground, it is easy to assume
that any traces of people who once lived
here must have been destroyed. Maps from
the early 1900s only make this seem more
likely, since they show that the area was an
industrial district. But an archeological study
of this area found important Native
American sites, including one remarkable
burial. It seems that a large amount of
earth was dumped on the site before the
factories were built, protecting the Indian
site from the later construction of the
Whitehurst Freeway.
suggesting that
women prepared
food here. A large
pitted stone was
used for grinding
nuts. Stone
tools were
made and
repaired here.
A large grooved
ax shows us that
people chipped
wood, maybe for
dugout canoes.
What accounts for the repeated visits to
these spots over such a long time? The
stream enters the Potomac not far below
Little Falls. People traveling by canoe
upstream might have landed here rather
than fight the current. Canoes could have
been portaged around the falls along the
stream, which provides a convenient route
through the steep bluffs. But these sites
were probably not merely short-term
camps. Many ceramic vessels were used,
Decorated Potsherd,
about 700 Years
Old, from a Site
Near Little Falls.
When professional archeologists first
worked around Washington, in the 1870s
and 1880s, the city was rich with ancient
Native American remains. Large sites lined
both banks of the Anacostia River, and they
stretched for miles along the Potomac from
Rock Creek to above Little Falls. The early
archeologists called these sites "villages,"
but most of them were not villages at all.
They were simply places where hunter-
gatherers camped again and again for
thousands of years, each time leaving
behind a few traces of themselves, until
the accumulated material looked like
the remains of a town. A few bits of
the sites that once lined the Potomac
bluffs survive in Palisades Park and
other green spaces, and homeowners in
nearby neighborhoods sometimes find
spearpoints in their gardens, but most
of those sites were long ago destroyed
by development.
The Whitehurst Freeway burial closely
resembles burials made in upstate New
York around the same time. The
resemblance is so strong that either the
woman who was buried here or her parents
may have come from the north. This
connection is fascinating to archeologists
and historians because it fits with other
evidence pointing to migration from the
Great Lakes region to the Chesapeake
around that time. The Indians who lived in
coastal Maryland and Virginia in the 1600s
spoke Algonquian languages closely related
to languages spoken around the Great
Lakes. Iroquoian languages were also
spoken in both regions. The Whitehurst
Potsherds and stone tools found
throughout the area show people camped
here between 5,000 and 500 years ago.
The burial that makes the site so exciting
was found only a few feet from the
freeway and Rock Creek and Potomac
Parkway. This pit contained the cremated
The people who visited the
site between 400 BC and AD 1000 left
dozens of crude points on the site. These
tools have a "throwaway" appearance, as if
they were made, used, and discarded in a
matter of
minutes. The
people who
made these
points also used
pottery. These
sites must have
been visited
often in this
period, possibly
by family
groups; the
stone
spearpoints
imply the
presence of
men, pottery the
presence of
women, and the
valley is too
narrow to have
held a large
Crudely Made "Selby Bay” Spear Points
camp or village. or Knives from a Site Near Little Falls.
Historic Indians
lived in large villages for only part of the
year, during the seasons of planting and
harvesting corn. In the summer and winter,
smaller parties left the villages and went on
hunting, fishing, and gathering expeditions.
The sites on our little stream may have
been used mainly by wandering bands in
the autumn. The large nut-grinding stone
certainly points to the fall, and cold
weather would also help explain the choice
of these sheltered spots, flanked by steep
hills.
Archeologists Digging a Test Pit Beside the Fallen Tree that
Revealed the Location of the Little Falls Sites.
0
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In 2004 archeologists exploring a small
stream valley just below Little Falls made
a startling discovery. Native Americans
generally camped on bluffs or by the
river's banks, not in narrow valleys, and
these archeologists had no plans to do
formal testing in this valley. Until, that
is, they happened to inspect the root
ball of a tree that had recently fallen
across the stream. Such root balls
provide a glance at the soil hidden
under leaves and undergrowth, and
sometimes archeologists might see an
artifact or two on the exposed soil,
hinting at the presence of a site. But on
this particular root ball there was much
more than just one or two artifacts:
three spearpoints and a piece of
decorated Indian pottery. This was the
first clue to what have turned out to be
amazing archeological sites.
989
a
The stream is so small that in places you
can hop across, and the valley floor
around it is no more than 50 feet wide.
When archeologists dug test units on
the flat areas by the stream they found
Artifacts from the Whitehurst Freeway Site, about 1300 Years Old, including an Antler Comb, Sharks' Teeth, and a Stone
Phallus.
Archeologists Recording a Test Unit in Rock Creek Park.
PROTECT OUR SITES
The Archeological Resource Protection Act makes it a federal crime
to damage archeological sites on federal lands or to remove
artifacts from federal property. Unauthorized metal detecting and
artifact collecting are strictly forbidden in the park and on all
other federal property.
Report Crimes and Park Emergencies to 1-866-677-6677 Toll Free