ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, September 17, 1996 TAG: 9609170054
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: SALTVILLE
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
A SALTVILLE RESEARCHER wants supporting conclusions from others before publishing articles about possibly the Western Hemisphere's oldest people.
Researchers from the Smithsonian Institution are weighing in on whether Saltville holds traces of the earliest human life found so far in the Western Hemisphere.
Jerry McDonald, who has been doing archaeological research in Saltville since the early 1980s, said human artifacts at Saltville date back 14,000 years - a few hundred years older than those found at a site in Chile. McDonald, a former faculty member at Radford University, made his announcement to the Association of American Geographers meeting in Charlotte, N.C., on April 11.
Some of the articles are identified as man-made tools used to butcher a mastodon and cook it over an open fire on a plain that would one day be known as Saltville.
"As you go back in time, the questions increase in proportion to the evidence. ... It's not a cut-and-dried process of finding and arriving at conclusive answers," McDonald said earlier this month when he returned to the Smyth County town with three Smithsonian researchers. "You want all the corroboration that you can possibly get."
"It's a pretty complex situation here," said Dennis Stafford, chairman of the Smithsonian's anthropology department. ``And it has the potential to yield a lot of important information of what was going on here 14,000 years ago. ... So it's very important from that perspective alone."
Stafford and his wife, Peggy Jodry, who has been studying Paleo-Indian sites since 1979, said it was lucky that someone of McDonald's caliber became interested in the Saltville site because such research is never simple.
"If you're not comfortable with a certain amount of ambiguity, then archaeology is not the field for you," she said she tells her students. "We're a complex animal - but that's what makes it interesting and fun."
Stafford and Jodry spent a day with McDonald at the Saltville site while on their way to do field work in Colorado. "Boy, I was wondering what we were going to talk about, Dennis," Jodry said as she and the others ogled dozens of tools, bones, tusks and other Saltville finds presented by McDonald.
Was this one sharpened, or eroded into its shape by running water? Was that one made from a mastodon tusk and re-shaped by early human beings over a fire? The questions seemed endless enough to last well past driving to Colorado.
The third Smithsonian researcher was anthropologist Elizabeth Moore, who had dug for some of those artifacts in the mud at Saltville in 1985 while a student at American University. McDonald had recruited student volunteers for summer digs from many colleges and universities.
Moore also is the newest board member of the Saltville Foundation, which is working toward the creation of the Museum of the Middle Appalachians planned for Saltville. The proposed museum plans to take full advantage of all the artifacts and information on prehistoric animal and human life unearthed here over the years.
Steven Thompson, who teaches at Virginia Tech's School of Architecture in Blacksburg, is interim director for the museum project.
"As always, with scientific research, you raise about 10 questions for every one you answer," said Washington County geologist Charles Bartlett, the man who invited McDonald to visit Saltville some 15 years ago. That invitation came when Saltville resident Charlie Bill Totten happened across what turned out to be an 11,500-year-old cutting tool made by Paleo-Indian inhabitants of the area.
It had been sticking out of a block of clay removed by a backhoe from a site where the remains of a musk ox had been found. The musk ox bones were down 4 or 5 feet with sterile ground above them, Bartlett said. So it was decided to remove that ground by backhoe.
"It was, of course, above the musk ox," Bartlett said. "It's a flint, but it's not a local flint."
Discoveries like that, along with the bones of prehistoric animals, kept McDonald coming back to Saltville and organizing excavations.
Further excavation and possible publication of findings in a scientific journal are now in McDonald's future.
"A lot of what I'm going to do next depends on what you guys think," he told the Smithsonian team. "The questions seem to increase as the materials seem to decrease."
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: PAUL DELLINGER Saltville researcher Jerry McDonaldby CNB(second from left) consults with Smithsonian Institution visitors
Dennis Stafford (left), Peggy Jodry (third from left) and Elizabeth
Moore (right).