Archaeologists uncover town's past

Dr. Paul Shackel and Ph.D candidate, Michael Roller, were featured in the news in Lattimer, PA called "Archaeologists uncover town's past."  The grove of trees obscured signs of civilization, but Michael Roller searched anyway.  Soon he and fellow archaeologist Paul Shackel noticed depressions where foundations had settled from houses that once stood at the end of a path off Canal Street in Lattimer.  Roller, a graduate student from the University of Maryland, and students working with him this summer began digging test pits. Soon they started marking off 5-foot squares with string and scraping into the past.  While sifting the dirt from each layer that they excavated, they found children's marbles, glass shards, pottery chips, buttons and bits from pipes favored by tobacco smokers. As they dug deeper, they hit the rock foundations of homes built by coal miners as many as 120 years ago. The houses started collapsing in the 1940s and '50s. Locals remember one standing into the 1960s. Nowadays, people, if they give the grove a second look, would think nothing ever existed there.  Roller knew otherwise because he spent part of last year sorting through archives that retired Hazleton engineer Joseph Michel collected about Lattimer and other coal towns around Hazleton.

In Michel's records, Roller found maps showing the location of houses north of Canal Street, named for a ditch that once carried water for washing coal. Contrasted with the evenly spaced homes to the south in the main section of Lattimer, the homes north of Canal Street were scattered haphazardly. The archaeologists found indications that the homes had changed over the years. Homes drawn on successive maps took slightly different shapes. While digging, they found nails of different sorts and manufacture. Roller and Shackel theorized that miners often repaired or enlarged their homes, perhaps from scavenged materials. "They were built by inhabitants, maybe with the help of the company. Maybe not," Shackel said.  Read more...

Published on Wed, 08/08/2012 - 16:15