The Sommerheim Park Archaeological District includes a group of six

archaeological site An archaeological site is a place (or group of physical sites) in which evidence of past activity is preserved (either prehistoric or historic or contemporary), and which has been, or may be, investigated using the discipline of archaeology a ...

s west of

Erie Erie (; ) is a city on the south shore of Lake Erie and the county seat of Erie County, Pennsylvania, United States. Erie is the fifth largest city in Pennsylvania and the largest city in Northwestern Pennsylvania with a population of 94,831 a ...

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...

in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

. The sites are in Sommerheim Park, one of the few undeveloped areas of the

Lake Erie Lake Erie ( "eerie") is the fourth largest lake by surface area of the five Great Lakes in North America and the eleventh-largest globally. It is the southernmost, shallowest, and smallest by volume of the Great Lakes and therefore also h ...

shoreline, in Millcreek Township. This district has been listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic ...

. This is one of the leading archaeological sites in the Erie area and along the southern shoreline of Lake Erie, due to the amount of artifacts and the lack of disturbance on the site.

Discoveries

Excavations revealed artifacts across a wide area of the park, including in the north where there are former farmlands and in dense woods along the park's eastern edge. The artifacts uncovered represent a wide range of archaeological cultures. Digs at six sites have found evidence from the entire Archaic period (roughly 8,000BCE to 1,000BCE) and the Early and Middle Woodland period (roughly 1,000BCE to 500CE). Artifacts include an especially dense concentration of Late Archaic remnants as well as a nineteenth-century dump created after European settlement. Various stone tools and evidence of Late Archaic houses have been found, indicating that the area may have been occupied seasonally by a fishing and hunting people. Although the findings have been largely limited to the tops of the area's bluffs, scholars believe that the edges of the bluffs may yield evidence of prehistoric cemeteries. The district is significant because few seasonal campsites from before the Late Woodland period have been discovered along Lake Erie.

Excavation

Local archaeologist C. Frederick Sanford's discovery of

Plano point In archaeology, Plano point is flaked stone projectile points and tools created by the various Plano cultures of the North American Great Plains between 9000 BC and 6000 BC for hunting, and possibly to kill other humans. They are bifacially work ...

s in Sommerheim Park in 1975 led to the first recognition of the area as a possible archaeological site. Students at Erie's Gannon University investigated the park under the leadership of a university archaeologist in the summer of that year, beginning a program of annual field schools that continued through the rest of the 1970s. These excavations yielded little evidence of disturbance at the sites, adding to their significance. While some parts of the bluffs had been cultivated after European settlement of the area, the damage was limited to the shallow upper layers of earth that could be cultivated with horse-drawn plows. The district's location on a lake bluff is likely to be the reason that it has survived; many similar sites likely once existed along nearby beaches and ridges, but they have likely been destroyed by the expansion of Erie and its suburbs and by

quarry A quarry is a type of open-pit mine in which dimension stone, rock, construction aggregate, riprap, sand, gravel, or slate is excavated from the ground. The operation of quarries is regulated in some jurisdictions to reduce their envir ...

ing for sand and gravel.

Preservation

Well-preserved Native American archaeological sites are a rarity in the Lake Erie plain. The amount of information found at the Sommerheim Park sites makes them one of the leading archaeological sites in the Erie area and the southern shoreline of Lake Erie. In recognition of their significance, the sites were designated a historic district and listed on the

in 1986. No other Native American village sites northwest of

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Western Pennsylvania, the second-most populous city in Pennsylva ...

are listed on the Register, and the only other prehistoric site on the Register in northwestern Pennsylvania is Indian God Rock, a petroglyph in Venango County.

Discoveries

Excavation

Preservation

See also

References

Further reading