Shawnee-Minisink Site is a prehistoric

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

located in Smithfield Township,

Monroe County, Pennsylvania Monroe County is a county in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. As of the 2020 census, the population was 168,327. Its county seat is Stroudsburg. The county is part of the Northeast Pennsylvania region of the state. The county was formed fr ...

in the upper

Delaware Valley The Philadelphia metropolitan area, also known as Greater Philadelphia and informally called the Delaware Valley, the Philadelphia tri-state area, and locally and colloquially Philly–Jersey–Delaware, is a major metropolitan area in the Nor ...

. It was the site of a Paleoindian camp site. ''Note:'' This includes It was added to the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government's official United States National Register of Historic Places listings, list of sites, buildings, structures, Hist ...

in 2007.

Archaeology

The site covers an area of about 4,000 square meters with the Paleo-Indian and Early Archaic remains some meters below the ground. It was first excavated in 1972, in two short seasons (test squares with additional auguring totally 38 square meters) by a non-scientist archaeologist Don Kline. From 1974 to 1977 it was excavated by an American University team led by Charles W. McNett Jr. Additional excavations were conducted from 2003 to 2006 covering 40 square meters in an area south of the original excavations. Finds included a heavily reworked

Clovis point Clovis points are the characteristically fluted projectile points associated with the New World Clovis culture, a prehistoric Paleo-American culture. They are present in dense concentrations across much of North America and they are largely restr ...

and a number of scrapers and cores. Two hearths were found in the Clovis layer which when radiocarbon dated produced a mean date of 10,937 ± 15 years

Before Present Before Present (BP) or "years before present (YBP)" is a time scale used mainly in archaeology, geology, and other scientific disciplines to specify when events occurred relative to the origin of practical radiocarbon dating in the 1950s. Because ...

.Iceland, Harry, "Refining Paleo-Indian Lithic Technology at Shawnee-Minisink via an Artifact Refitting Study", North American Archaeologist, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 237-267, 2013

References

{{Authority control Archaeological sites on the National Register of Historic Places in Pennsylvania Monroe County, Pennsylvania National Register of Historic Places in Monroe County, Pennsylvania Native American history of Pennsylvania