Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 5, 1991 TAG: 9103050312
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID REED ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: SALTVILLE LENGTH: Medium
The find by the amateur archaeologist inspired excavations in the mid-1980s that turned up fossilized skeletons of other extinct mammals like ground sloths, mastodons and mammoths.
The dig also uncovered stone tools and weapons from the earliest Virginians - Indians of the Clovis culture, who migrated from Siberia through Alaska and across the continent 11,000 to 12,000 years ago.
This summer, scientists will begin excavations on a larger scale with the goal of discovering more about the relationship between the prehistoric hunters and their prey.
"In the eastern United States, there are very, very few sites that go back this far, with early man's tools associated with extinct animals," said Sandra Olsen, curator of archaeology at the Virginia Museum of Natural History.
Jerry McDonald, a research associate with both the museum and the Smithsonian Institution, believes the sites may produce evidence of human habitation as far back as 14,000 years ago.
"I think we are going to have the potential to push back the presence of man," McDonald said.
The museum and Virginia Tech are conducting the excavations and surveys with 20 people who will live at the university's geological field station in Saltville. The museum will provide public tours of the dig site from July 4 through Aug. 4, and the work may continue during the next four summers.
The small hollow between Walker and Clinch mountains in Smyth County has long been known as an area rich in both fossil deposits and geological phenomenon.
The marsh - which has areas of both freshwater and saltwater - is the remnant of an ancient river that flowed through the valley and into a nearby ocean.
In 1782, when the area was known as Buffalo Lick, Arthur Campbell initiated the scientific interest by sending a mastodon tooth to Thomas Jefferson. That also was the year Campbell undertook the first commercial development of salt, a staple for Ice Age mammals as well as humans.
"Animals came down the mountains to get their dietary requirement of salt, and man tracked them in here through the gaps that are now the modern paved roads you drove to get here," Totten said.
The gap to the West was where 5,200 Union soldiers descended in September 1864 to destroy the Confederacy's last salt works. The production was critical to feeding the army because smoking and salting were the only methods of preserving meat.
The Confederate force of 2,800 held them off, but a second attack a month later at the edge of the marsh was successful.
Totten, a biologist who runs the town's sewage treatment plant, was looking for Indian and Civil War artifacts when he found the musk ox bones.
He pointed to the blue-gray clay covering the ancient riverbed where his initial discovery was made. A family of ducks waddled in the distance and a gray crane flew over a thicket of marsh grass and milkweed.
"The degree of preservation is unbelievable," he said. "No oxygen and a minimum of water penetrates.
"As you trowel down, so to speak, as you remove each layer, it's like turning the pages of a history book," he said. "But nowhere else can you get a continuing grid like here. It's a smorgasbord of finds."
Olsen said they hope to show that the diet of the "Clovis people" was more diverse than currently believed.
In addition to recovering the remains of extinct animals, the dig team will try to reconstruct the environment and climate of the Late Pleistocene Epoch characterized by the appearance of man.
The Clovis people looked much like the American Indians and had the same intellectual capacity of modern man, Olsen said.
Four Clovis spear points have been found in the Saltville area, more than anywhere in Virginia except for areas of Dinwiddie and Mecklenburg counties.
The dig team in Saltville will be looking for a "kill site" where animals were butchered by the hunters.
"We have the opportunity to find the animal bones directly associated with stone tools," she said. "What we may find here is that in addition to big game like mammoths, these people were more regularly relying on animals like the prehistoric caribou, which were about the same size as a white tail deer, and musk oxen, which were the size of large bison."
by CNB