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Home : Quarterly Archives : Volume 6 |
Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society |
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Source: November 1947 Volume 6 Number 4, Pages 81–88 The Broomall Rock Shelters
Rock Shelter near Broomall In the fall of 1943 Dr. and Mrs. H.O. Albrecht of Springfield, Delaware County, telephoned to inform me of the discovery of a human burial in a rock shelter near Broomall, on the West Chester Pike. The Albrechts are members of the Society for American Archaeology and are alive to the necessity of careful control in archeological work so that all the data that a site may provide might be noted, and the desired result -- a picture of the life of the people -- reconstructed, and their niche in the Prehistory of the country determined. Archeology, should be very grateful to Dr. and Mrs. Albrecht for this, for, without their collaboration, the results of these excavations would now be no more than that usual, unfortunately, in such cases: a small collection of arrowheads and other "artifacts", scattered through several private collections, mixed, with objects from other places, and telling no story. Now however, the very interesting and archeologically important results of this work show what can be ascertained by digging done according to careful archeological technique on a site which at first seemed of slight interest, and may set an example which should be followed in the event of similar discoveries in this region. I would like to say first that most of the information herein is taken from the published scientific report on the site recently published in the national archeological journal: "Two Lenape Rock Shelters near Philadelphia," by Mary Butler (American Antiquity, Volume 12, No. 4, April, 1947, pp, 246-255). Some more is derived from the Atwater Kent Museum Bulletin, Volume 5, No. 3 plus, of course, my personal recollections. Knowing that I had neither the time nor the transportation facilities to give the work the careful supervision that it needed, I asked my colleague Dr. Mary Butler (Mrs. Clifford Lewis, 3d) of Media if she could take over the work, and was delighted when she agreed. She had had much experience in local archeology, since, in addition to having done much work in Maya archeology in Guatemala, she had conducted work in Somerset County, western Pennsylvania, for the State Historical Commission, as well as an archeological survey of the Hudson River Valley for Vassar College in 1939-40. With this experience, and living rather close to the site, she was therefore ideally qualified for the job, and this she did in the best scientific and most efficient manner. The Albrechts took us to the site where, upon encountering in their diggings the burial, the diggers had, on Dr. Albrecht's advice, covered it with a box and stopped work until technically trained supervision could be obtained. Long before this I should have mentioned the real discoverers of the site, Messers. J. Frank Sterling, of Broomall, Paul Delgrego of Kirklyn. and W. W. Yanney of Springfield, amateur archeologists who, like many others, spend their week-ends and holidays searching fields for arrowheads, and digging at promising places. They collaborated by doing the digging according to the careful methods outlined, and they now have in their private collections the tangible results of the work, except for the human skeleton, which they gave to the University Museum. The Museum "also, to which both Dr. Butler and I belong gave all facilities for the work by lending equipment. And so every warm, rainless week-end, and holiday for the next year the digging went on and a large group could be found there - a happy groups, for almost all brought their wives and children along. Mrs. Albrecht and the Albrecht children were generally there, also Mr. Lewis,and of course little Ellie Reed Lewis in her bassinette. (Mary says Ellie cut her teeth on an arrowhead!) and naturally there were always plenty of visitors. The TEHC made several trips to see the work going on, and Mr. Burns, Mr. Okie, Mr. Read and I took especial interest in the diggings. The excavation was conducted as far as possible according to the best professional archeological technique. Base-lines were laid out with compass and level, the shelter was divided into squares and excavated according to levels, and the effort was made to have every object found catalogued and recorded as to place and depth where found. The dirt was sifted, and mason's trowels, knives, brushes and plumb-bobs were in far more frequent use than spades. After the work was finished, the discoverers of the shelters, who did most of the digging both before and after the professional supervision was enlisted, lent the finds for public exhibition. They were shown first at the University Museum, in several cases, accompanied by most informatory labels prepared by Dr. Butler, and later they formed the major part of a special exhibition on Indian Philadelphia for a long time at the Atwater Kent Museum, of which Mr. Lewis is a trustee. Indian sites in the Philadelphia region are extremely rare. (See "Aboriginal Sites in Chester County," TEHC Quarterly, Volume 3, No. 1, January 1940, pp. 2-12 and "The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Chester County "Ibid., Volume 2, No. 2, April 1939, pp.41-43) The population was sparse; no mounds were made. Though sites with arrowheads and chips on the surface are not uncommon, the depth of deposit is almost always very slight, scarcely worth the trouble of digging and indicating a brief, period of occupation. No scientific report of a careful excavation in this region is on record. All the Indian "Cemeteries" reported are presumably of the Colonial period, and the only published reports of the excavation of any such refer to such objects as glass beads and guns. Most archeologists today agree with the deduction of Mr. C. A. Weslager of Wilmington that, such was the fear of the native Lenape for the Minqua of the Lower Susquehanna River, the former had all their permanent villages (at least seven of them) on the site of the City of Philadelphia, where they were protected by the two rivers from sudden attack and had only temporary seasonal and hunting camps in the surrounding region. So the careful excavation of an aboriginal camp site with a burial was of great scientific importance. The first glance at the burial indicated its Indian nature, for if lay only a few inches under the surface of the dirt in the shelter, had no trace of a coffin, and was buried in doubled-up "pre-natal" position, which is the most usual aboriginal practice, since it required a minimum of excavation for persons who had to do it with sticks and stones. But let's get down to a description of the Broomall rock shelters, their contents and implications. Along Langford Run, a tributary of Darby Creek, only a short distance south of the West Chester Pike, is a small region of very rough terrain. By "rough" I mean with places where there are perpendicular--or even overhanging--cliffs, scalable with great difficulty, and steep hills, hard to climb. Of course it is untillable land, and even too irregular for habitation. It is, therefore, practically virgin forest, and was much used by Boy Scouts for camping and outings. It should be kept permanently as a park. The highest cliffs, known as Kemble's Rocks are close to Langford Run, facing south-west and in one place there is an over hang at the bottom with a considerable flat area, sunny and protected and with water close at hand, an ideal place for a camp. Langford Road now runs between the brook and the base of the cliffs, but formerly the land is said to have been swampy. Now the edge of the road is only about eight feet from the edge of the site. There are other smaller shelters in the cliff face above, but none with any depth of soil. It was in this bottom shelter that the skeleton was found, and the site was called "D2." Crossing the hill, to the north, or circling the cliffs and following up the Run, one, comes to a little valley with more gently sloping sides, and on the north side of the stream is a great rock or outcrop with tilted strata so that it afforded a shelter beneath it on the southwest side, also a convenient place for a camp. This is referred to as "D1." The habitable area of shelter D2 was about 18 by 30 feet. The occupation layer was about one foot in thickness with a dark, brown color and level surface. This lay on sandy yellow soil, and, towards the margins, was covered with similar yellow earth, washed down from the hills since the spot was abandoned. Stone and bone objects and animal bones were very common in the brown occupation level and continued into the yellow soil beneath, but were missing in the upper wash. As before remarked, the burial was at a very slight depth and doubled up, lying on its right side, the head to the southeast. The bones were studied by Dr. J. Lawrence Angel of Jefferson Medical College who decided that the deceased was a woman of about thirty-seven years of age, with the general Characteristics of the Lenni Lepape Indians, (Delawares), but naturally with some individual peculiarities. She was about 5'3" tall, had lost twenty-five of her teeth before death (unusual for an Indian), and
The Indian skeleton excavated near Broomall suffered from arthritis of the upper vertebrae, probably as a result of much burden-bearing. Nothing was buried with her, but the body had been covered with a thin layer of white clay. Probably the most interesting feature of this burial was the fact that traces of the hole left by a large post, about a foot in diameter, were found about twenty inches beyond the head. It is such a point as this that the amateur digger misses in his search for objects. Now the best reports that we have on the life of the Lenape Indians were written by Moravian Missionaries Loskiel and Heckwelder who lived with them after they had been moved to Ohio toward the end of the eighteenth century. Loskiel write that "At the head of the corpse, which always lies toward the east, a tall post is erected pointing out who is buried there." While this was apparently done mainly in the case of chiefs or warriors of note, Heckewelder reports observing the same ritual in the case of the wife of a famous chief. We may therefore reasonably conclude that our burial was that of a woman of importance, probably a chief's wife. Apparently the shelter was not used after the burial was made, which is another Indian custom. In the occupation layer of shelter, D2, the one with the burial, a few "trade goods" were found, objects of "white" manufacture. Naturally some of these belong to the last two centuries, after the time of the departure of the last Indian groups from this region, but a number of fragments of Englis white clay pipes were found throughout the earth of the occupation layer, and these, as usual, bear the maker's marks and are ascribed to the period 1688-1702. We may therefore reasonably date the time of occupation of this shelter as about contemporary with the foundation of the city of Philadelphia. The objects of native manufacture found were, of course, mainly arrowheads and other projectile points, knives, drills or gravers, scrapers, bone awls, bone flakers and potsherds. More unusual finds were several gorgets, a pestle, fragments of pottery tobacco pipes, and a celt; triangular arrowheads, one of the criteria of a late period, were rather frequent. Pitted stones, hammer stones, mortars and mullers and similar common rude implements were also found. The chipped stone-work was rather rude, but the number of chips found indicated that at least some of the work was done on the spot. This is interesting in view of the materials used; lava, quartz, quartzite, slate, shale, soapstone, siltstone, sandstone, chert, as well as the native stones such as Wissahickon schist. Most of these are not; very satisfactory materials for flaking and chipping, and the common opinion has always been that the Indians merely' used the best materials available in their region. However a study of these stones by professional petrologists indicates that very few of them occur locally. The Slates, shales and sandstones must have come from the Allegheny Mountain region, 50 or 60 miles away, and the lava could not have been found nearer than Chambersburg, 120 miles to the west. This indicates considerable trade in aboriginal days. The other shelter, D1, which was more like a small cave, was not excavated under supervision, but the diggers kept this material separate and it was studied independently. Much of it came from the area in front of the shelter for a considerable distance down to the stream. The objects found were much the same, but there was considerable differentiation in the particular there were various types of projectile points and in particular there were many fewer triangular arrowheads. This, together with the fact that no objects of "white" manufacture were found, led Dr. Bulter to conclude that this was a little the earlier in point of time, probably in the early seventeenth century, just before the arrival of European colonists. About a thousand potsherds, or broken p a r t s of pottery vessels were recovered from each of these shelters. These came of course from a number of vessels, and indicated, as did the pestle, that the shelters were used more permanently than merely by overnight hunting parties. Using great care, however, and replacing missing parts with plaster, the men were able to reconstruct three vessels, all deep, wide, round-bottomed and collarless, typical of the pottery of the Lenni Lenape. They were tempered with sand or gravel and all were covered with rude decoration, generally made with a stick or paddle wrapped with cord, but a few sherds showed simple geometric straight-line designs. Archeologists have recently developed a "taxonomic classification", imitating botanists and zoologists in their terminology. By the presence or absence of certain objects in a site they classify it and place it with other sites of similar characteristics as presumably occupied by the same or a closely related people, even if they do not know who the people were historically. The trait complex of the Broomall Shelters is almost identical with that found in southern New Jersey and classified as the Red Valley focus, Coastal aspect, Northeastern phase, woodland pattern. In New Jersey the people of this "focus" were presumed to be the Delawares, but at Broomall the occupants of these shelters, used in early historic times, could have been none but the Lenni Lenape, and specifically the Unami branch; for the Susquehannocks had objects of quite different character, and they belonged to an entirely different "pattern", that of the Mississippi Valley. The Red Valley focus, typical of the Late Coastal Algonkin Culture, is therefore now definitely tied up with the Unami Delaware, and traced for the first time to southeastern Pennsylvania. From our excavations, then, we can reconstruct a picture somewhat as follows. The shelters were used for seasonal occupation by a small group, possibly recurrently by one family, from the permanent villages on the site of Philadelphia. The occupants were most certainly of the Onami group of the Lenni Lenape or Delawares, who occupied the land from the Lehigh River to the Delaware state line. Here they lived for some weeks or months, hunting deer, rabbit, raccoon, woodchuck, fox, (bones of all of which were found and identified), and other native animals. The shelters, protected by lean-tos of bark, skin, logs and brush served as habitations. The women made pottery vessels which frequently were dropped and broken, possibly by the children. Indians, however, were very kind to their children and never gave them physical punishment. The scene is a perfect picturization of what Weslager wrote in 1942: "Everything" points to the conclusion that the Philadelphia villages housed the largest part of the Delaware population on the western shore of the river, and that hunting parties fanned out from these villages at certain times of the year to seek fish and game in the surrounding regions. These parties were away from their homes perhaps months, certainly weeks at a time, and consequently they found temporary abode in rock shelters and camp sites generally located in the vicinity of springs or running streams of water. Since all the large Unami villages have long since disappeared beneath the brick and asphalt of Philadelphia, there is little hope of finding any site hereabouts much larger than these shelters, which may therefore be taken as the most typical known sites of this region.
Vases from rock shelters
Materials from rock shelters |
