And now for some American Archaeology

I had field school in Long Island Archaeology taught by R.M. Gramly, Ph.D., of R.P.I. and Harvard University (and other classes) in 1977, assisted by Margaret Gwynne, Ph.D., since a Stony Brook faculty member and Sherene Baugher, Ph.D., whose doctoral defense at Stony Brook I attended, who became NYC's first Landmarks Preservation Commission Archaeologist, now President of the Council For Northeastern Historical Archaeology (CNEHA, I am also a member) and at Cornell University in Landscape Architecture. As a graduate student I submitted a proposal in a "Archaeology Proposal Writing" class taught by a then National Science Foundation (NSF) advisor in their archaeology proposals, Edward Lanning. Ph.D. In that proposal class, testing and research was submitted for a site nearby the Vera Cruz, PA "jasper mine" which I had visited a number of times. The mine had been partially destroyed by the N.E. Extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, lithics from it, (abandoned about 1610 A.D. according to early tree-ring dating by Pennsylvania's folk museologist, Dr. Mercer) found as far away as New England, according to the DOT sign. The Seem Seed Farm, where I mapped and collected some lithics, nearby, was then in the way of another interchange proposed, for Allentown, PA. I had worked in the nearby Hopewell Village Foundry, NHS, for the Dept. of Interior's Denver Service Center in the archaeology of the "Ironmaster's House" after receiving my B.A. We stayed in a youth hostel in Geigertown, PA, for cheap, included in the proposal. A retired teacher across the street from "Jasper Park" in Vera Cruz, PA, had shown me a fluted point dated by the U. of Penn., they said, "...to be at least 10,000 years old" which he found next door in the plowed corn field. While an undergrad I had visited various lithic source areas in the region with fellow students. In field school, we visited "Mt. Jasper" and it's rhyolite adit, near Berlin, New Hampshire, on the Androscoggin River drainage which has "curated assemblages" (estimated over 1/4 million in R.M. Gramly's published research) as tools were discarded and made from rhyolite (green to grey) found as far away as the Maine coast. A part of the Androscoggin River drainage (said to be America's "most abused" river in "Evolution of a Valley") it empties into the Atlantic after flowing through Maine. Cryptocrystalline quartz, the "jasper" in NE Pennsylvania, however, has another origin, not volcanic. It's said to be from nodule formation in limestone percolated by super-heated steam, and drainage. It is usually brown but turns red when heat-treated. This jasper in PA is also known as "turtleback" jasper, from the turtle shaped sections found, perhaps shaped to be carried a long distance as a turtle carries its shell. I worked with a flint-knapper there from Maryland who had such a piece, perhaps a morphological trait from primary flaking of the large nodules, formed under geological pressure.