On a quiet strip of Loyalhanna Creek in Westmoreland County, long before millionaires built weekend retreats nearby, American Indians knelt to chip spear points from stones. They gathered freshwater mussels in the shallows and roasted elk in fire pits.

Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Bob Oshnock found this arrowhead, a few thousand years old, and a bow point, about 600 years old, while exploring areas where Native Americans once lived near Ligonier. Click photo for larger image.

For 8,000 years, Indians fished, hunted, cooked and sewed. They lived and died here. Within the past 400 years they vanished altogether, leaving behind little but broken pots, stone tools and ashes. Today, the spot where their village stood is nondescript, another field of wildflowers.

But early this summer, heiress Cordelia Scaife May donated this 10-acre stretch of Ligonier Township creek bank, as well as another, smaller site nearby, to the Archaeology Conservancy, a New Mexico-based nonprofit dedicated to preserving pristine archaeological sites such as this one.

"It's called the Geisey site. It's vacant land, very scenic. A beautiful spot for archaeology," said Joe Navari, the Conservancy's Midwest Division associate director. "Geisey is multicomponent, used by more than one group over a long period of time. The creek flooded and buried small bits at a time. ... That flood plain is a time capsule of prehistory."

Since 1980, the Conservancy has bought five artifact-rich tracts of Western Pennsylvania, most of them former American Indian settlements, stockades and camps.

"We're buying them and then mostly just leaving them alone. Not digging up anything," said Latrobe archaeologist Bob Oshnock.

"We're losing sites so fast to developers and strip mines and highways that our grandchildren aren't going to have any sites left to explore," he said. "So we'll leave these for them to dig."

"We expect lots of stone tools, pottery and household goods, layers and layers of them," Navari said. "And back then, 'household goods' meant stone knives, arrowheads and spear points. Big spear points."

Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Bob Oshnock walks through a field outside Ligonier that was once home to a tribe of Monongehela Indians. He discovered the site in 1969. It was recently donated to the Archaeology Conservancy. Click photo for larger image.

No one will say exactly where Geisey is because known archaeological sites often attract souvenir hunters, Navari said.

Geisey's been a known, notable site for years, at least in archaeological circles.

Ever since Oshnock found it.

Oshnock, an engineer at a Latrobe steel plant, is the Johnny Appleseed of Westmoreland County's American Indian archaeology. He grew up in Latrobe, lives in Unity Township and spends his spare time wandering plowed fields, stream banks, wooded hillsides and other lonely places, his eyes scanning the ground. He's done it since he was a boy, he said, and in 40 years has identified almost 600 American Indian sites in Westmoreland County.

"Wherever you have springs or creeks, you'll have [American Indian] sites," Oshnock said. "They didn't have roads. They followed the creeks and rivers. We have plenty of those around here. ... It's never stopped amazing me that here in our fields we can find things thousands of years old. Flint chips, arrowheads, things that are older than the pyramids."

Oshnock discovered the Geisey site in 1967.

"I'd talked to the farmer, a guy who said he uncovered new things every time he plowed out there. And soon as I walked in, I knew. From the pottery pieces, the flints. I never put a shovel into the ground, but the surface items were diagnostic -- up top, a relatively recent Monongahela upland hunting camp, probably last used between [A.D 1200 and 1400]. And under that, other, older things."

Things like a dark gray spear point, broken in the middle.

"It's a Lacroix point. Dropped here by a nomadic hunter, long before there was a settlement here," Oshnock said. "It places humans here about 6300 B.C."

According to an announcement published in the fall issue of American Archaeological Quarterly, archaeologists think Geisey was a village of the Early to Middle Woodland Period, belonging to a tribe that thrived 6,000 years ago in what is now Pennsylvania and Ohio.

The Woodland Period saw the rise of horticulture, pottery and building mounds, phenomena that require a shift from wandering hunter-gatherer activity to a settled, stay-at-home society.

"The prospect of revealing information about this time of great change makes Geisey all the more important," Navari wrote in the magazine. "The site's research potential is great, as no formal excavations have been conducted there. Its alluvial soils also suggest the possibility of deep and stratified archaeological deposits that are undisturbed."

After the Woodland People faded from the scene, the Monongahelas built on the site.

No excavation is scheduled for Geisey. Conservancy sites are closed to visitors, and even scientists must write proposals and win board approval before they visit.

"We are quiet on purpose," Navari said. "We don't seek publicity. We're a preservation group. We never dig things up, per se. ... We want to learn from these places but leave them as undisturbed as possible."

The conservancy also owns Dividing Ridge, a 20-acre site in Derry Township where Monongahelas built a stockade and circular structures 1,000 years ago, and the Mary Rinn site in Indiana County, along Crooked Creek. There's another site in Washington County, but Navari wouldn't discuss it.

Nationally, conservancy holdings include Borax Lake in California, with 11,000 years of human habitation; Indian villages and an early Jesuit mission in Arizona; a 19th-century frontier Army post; and a Civil War battleground in Arkansas. Some Conservancy sites have been incorporated into public parks, including Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, Chaco Culture National Historic Park in New Mexico, Parkin Archaeological State Park in Arkansas and Hopewell Culture National Historical Park in Ohio.

The Archeological Conservancy was founded in 1980 and is funded by its 23,000 members. It owns 290 sites in 38 states and adds about five new tracts each year. Three prime sites, two of them in Westmoreland County, are on the group's wish list, Navari said, and one is "really big, downright significant."

So the past has a future in these parts.

"Keep an eye on the ground," Oshnock said. "Around here, you're likely to find anything."