Archaeology in Black and White: Digging Somerset County’s Past During the Great Depression

In 1994, a small team of archaeologists drove south from temporary lodgings in Somerset, in southwestern Pennsylvania, on State Route (S.R.) 219, to a point just north of Meyersdale, turned left into Indian Dig Road, and then left again onto Pony Farm Road. The archaeologists traveled a short distance up hill along this unpaved dirt road, before pulling their battered – and much maligned...
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Making a Future for the Past: New Dating Meets New Deal Archaeology

Imagine a scene set about nine hundred years ago. It is early autumn in a small farming village in the rugged Appalachian mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania. A harried mother stands in front of her small, beehive-shaped house and watches two young men playing chunkey – a lacrosse-type game – in the central plaza of her village. She gazes wistfully across the plaza, which is...
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