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Thursday, April 03, 2003

By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette Architecture Critic

Christine Davis let out a little whoop.

Her crew of professional archaeologists had been working for a few hours yesterday morning, sifting dirt taken from inside the Fort Pitt Blockhouse, when one of them handed her a small brown shard.

"This is Native American pottery," Davis said, turning it over in her hand. The five-sided fragment has an applied rim decorated with three impressions -- punctates, Davis called them -- that would have been made with a bone tool.

"This is really awesome. This is not your typical pottery from around here," Davis said. She said it would have come from a bowl perhaps 8 inches in diameter, made by one of the Iroquois tribes about 1740 to 1750.

"These are good finds for Western Pennsylvania, where there's a lot of acidic and wet soil," said Travis Bercel, who found the 2-inch shard.

"Bones and textiles and ceramics break down easily under those conditions," Bercel said, as he dropped the shard into a little plastic bag and tucked it in the bib pocket of his overalls.

Among the artifacts that turned up during yesterday's day-long dig were two oblong hammer stones, small enough to cradle in the palm of a hand and used to shape projectile points; a tiny projectile point that would have been attached to an arrow or dart shaft; and a net sinker, a rounded stone with grooves on either side. It would have been attached to a fishing net to hold it underwater.

Davis' Verona-based firm, Christine Davis Consultants, did archaeological investigations for the PNC Park site and historic Hanna's Town in Westmoreland County, and has conducted more than 400 cultural resource projects in the northeastern United States over the past 12 years.

At the blockhouse, she volunteered her six-person team for a day to continue the work begun a few weeks ago by California University of Pennsylvania anthropology professor John Nass and his students. On that limited excavation, which ended last week, Nass and company found a handful of artifacts associated with the fort, at a level about 8 inches below the dirt floor of the blockhouse.

"Our role was to demonstrate if there was anything below that level," Davis said, "and we've done that."

Davis, a consultant to the Point State Park master plan now under way, will recommend to the Daughters of the American Revolution, who have owned the blockhouse since 1894, that they postpone the pouring of a new concrete floor to allow time for a full, professional excavation of the ground beneath the five-sided stronghold, which is thought to have been built in 1764.

While it is likely an archaeological excavation will be done this summer elsewhere in the park, there is no site as undisturbed as the land beneath the blockhouse.

Davis praised the D.A.R. for maintaining the blockhouse through a period when the rest of the Point became heavily industrialized.

"The D.A.R. protected the blockhouse from certain destruction," Davis said. "A small group of women stood up to the likes of Henry Clay Frick when he wanted to expand a railroad freight station, and to [Pittsburgh Mayor] David Lawrence, who hoped to move the blockhouse to make way for Pittsburgh's first Renaissance."

Davis will plead her case Saturday to the board of the D.A.R.'s Fort Pitt Society, which will make the decision. In the meantime, she'll come up with an estimate of how long an extended dig would take and how much it could cost.

Davis said there has never been an archaeological dig in the area now known as Point State Park.

In the 1960s as the park was under construction, one archaeologist did what the profession calls "salvage work," working quickly -- 10 minutes per search -- behind a backhoe as areas were crudely excavated. But nothing was done before or since, Davis said.

While there is likely to be a cache of artifacts under the blockhouse, Nass said yesterday he doesn't think an extended dig would find much more related to the fort.

"There's not a thick layer of artifacts," Nass said outside the blockhouse. "A lot of additional work might find a few more things but we're not going to find a lot in large numbers."