Video

Ancient Quarry: Indians on the Mountain

Catoctin Mountain Park

Transcript

Landscape is full of clues left by people who lived here long ago. Some of them are obvious, but some of them are much harder to see and it takes a trained archeologist to spot them. Like these boulders behind me. This is an ancient archeological site. This outcrop is a kind of stone called rhyolite. that ancient Native Americans love to use to make their stone tools. Starting around 10,000 years ago, they began coming to these outcrops to get stone. Mining here was not complicated. They just knocked pieces of stone off the outcrops probably with a stone hammer until they got a piece that they liked. They carried those pieces down the hill to camps in flat places along the stream and there they shaped them into stone tools. This rock is a piece of rhyolite stone that ancient Native Americans loved to use to make their tool and this scar here is an actual mark left by the stone hammer thousands of years ago by an Indian who was removing stone from this boulder in front of us. Each one of these marks is like one letter in an archeological book that records the lives of people who lived long ago.

Description

Ancient Quarry: Indians on the Mountain

Duration

1 minute, 30 seconds

Credit

Greater Washington National Parks

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