Archaeologists unearthed in the Seattle dig area stone tools which are believed to be more than 10,000 years old and used by the inhabitants of the region.
More than four thousand stone tools have been discovered during the early stage of a mall construction in Seattle. The stone tools are believed to have been crafted about 10,000 years ago. Most of them are scrapers, awls, flakes, cobbles and spear points. Archaeologists believe they belong to the earliest inhabitants of the Seattle region. The majority of the tools have unusual concave builds.
Robert Kopperl, archaeologist and environmental consultant at Soil and Water Conservation Assistance, said that he and his team were pretty amazed by their findings. The archaeological crew unearthed more than 4,000 ancient tools in the area.
They never expected to discover one of the oldest archaeological sites on the west coast of America, not in the Puget Sound lowlands at least.
The chemical analysis of the ancient stone tools suggested what kind of food the forgotten ancestors of the region ate. They were using their tools to hunt bison, bears, deer, salmon and sheep.
The archaeological site is situated near Redmond Town Center Mall, Western Washington. The site was reviewed before in 2009. There are not many archaeological sites with fragments dating back to 10,000 years, not in the near region at least.
Kopperl said that a site of this kind is incredibly difficult to find in the area, mostly because it is covered by heavy vegetation and the Puget Sound ice sheets have affected the landscape greatly in time. The archaeologist adds that the location was very good for a camp because the inhabitants could use it as a main location for gathering and making stone tools, while also go out and hunt for food. The discovery of these ancient stone tools provided some new insight of the times when the ice sheets of the Redmont area melted and humans started to inhabit the region.
As industry workers are currently working on a salmon conservation site near the area, a dig of about 16 acres, the archaeologists announced that among the 4,000 stone tools they have also found a bone fragment from a salmon. That means salmon are not going anywhere. Kopperl declared for the Seattle Times that it’s as if life is “coming full circle.”
Although we now know a lot about the hunting tools of the inhabitants, and the discovery is vital to our understanding of how humans used to live their lives at that time, we still know very little about the origin of these inhabitants.
Photo Credits wikipedia
