Meadowcroft Rockshelter
United States · Americas
About
The Meadowcroft Rockshelter is an archaeological site which is located near Avella in Jefferson Township, Pennsylvania. The site is a rock shelter in a bluff overlooking Cross Creek (a tributary of the Ohio River), and contains evidence that the area may have been continually inhabited for at least 16,000 years and up to 19,000 years. If accurately dated, it would be one of the earliest known sites with evidence of a human presence and continuous human occupation in the New World.
The site is located twenty-seven miles west-southwest of Pittsburgh in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area.
The site operates as a division of the Heinz History Center of Pittsburgh and has a museum and a reconstruction of a circa 1570s Monongahela culture Indian village. Meadowcroft Rockshelter is recognized as a National Historic Landmark, a Pennsylvania Commonwealth Treasure, and as an official project of Save America's Treasures.
Adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)。Photography via Wikimedia Commons.