Hear the Story

Each year in mid-June, TU archaeology professor Robert Wall takes students to the Barton Site on Route 220, just south of Cumberland, Md. Dating back to 10,000 B.C., the prehistoric archaeological site once known as the Barton Farm sits on an Ice Age river bed adjacent to the Potomac River.

Archaeological evidence can offer a picture of how people lived before written history.

"What we find here is important because it's before written history," says Wall. "The only way we know about how these people lived is by excavation."

The project, started in 1993 through a partnership with the Archaeological Society of Maryland, allows for six to 12 students signed up for TU’s Archaeological Field School (ANTH 393) to conduct research and work with professionals on a public archaeology dig. The course is an introduction to archaeology, focusing on fieldwork and some laboratory analysis.

Over the years, Wall and his field students have uncovered archaeological data that has never before been revealed. “During the field school we work mostly on the last thousand years and then we go down to the post-Ice Age occupations,” he explains.

Students gain valuable field experience at the Barton Site.

Excavations in 2007 showed that a Keyser village in the area was last inhabited around the 1400s, by those who would have been the last pre-Contact period inhabitants to live on the site. Evidence of stone tools was found near a hearth where excavations revealed a chronological sequence from the late Pleistocene through the early Holocene. An early Archaic projectile point has tentatively been dated to circa 6,000 - 7,000 B.C.

Jason Tyler, a student who took part in the field school, comments, “It really opens your eyes – to people and to how archaeology relates to them today.”

Robert Wall says his students are fortunate to be able to contribute to the re-writing of prehistory. “It’s a site that has so much information to offer. People are always really excited to work here.” Excavations continue through mid-September each year and volunteers and visitors are welcome to participate, he adds.

When he’s not in the field, Professor Wall teaches North American Archaeology, Human Evolution and Prehistory, Archeological Lab Methods, and Archaeological Method and Theory in TU’s Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice.