Firelands Archaeological Center opens new digs in Amherst
Steve Fogarty | The Chronicle-Telegram
AMHERST — The new Firelands Archaeological Research Center will barely have its doors open when it gets its first load of historic artifacts.
“They’re in big trouble, and they don’t even know it yet,” joked Jeff Henry, of the Amherst Historical Society. “I’ve got a big collection of arrowheads that I’m going to bring in for them to look at.”
Henry worked Friday afternoon to finish making cuts into large squares of sandstone that will compose the walkway for the rustic-looking center, whose wood frame walls and overhang entrance resemble a building in a frontier settlement.
A joint venture of the Amherst Historical Society and Firelands Archaeological Society, the new center is the latest addition to Sandstone Village at North Lake Street and Milan Avenue.
“This will really cap things off,” Henry said. The village is also home to relocated historic buildings that house a restaurant, art gallery, vintage automotive garage, blacksmith shop and chapel.
The Firelands Archaeological Research Center will be dedicated today with an open house noon to 5 p.m. in the archaeological lab, where researchers will demonstrate artifact identification. At 3 p.m., Glen Boatman, a University of Toledo research assistant, will give a talk on the “Seeman’s Fort Defensive Earthworks” in the chapel on the Sandstone Village grounds.
The center will serve as a base for archaeological digs done in Lorain County, Brian Redmond said. Redmond has overseen a number of digs as curator and head of archaeology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
Researchers at the center will analyze items such as pieces of pottery, tools and projectile points like those unearthed this summer at Burrell orchard in the French Creek Reservation of the Lorain County Metro Parks.
“Before now, this kind of work was done out of garages and basements,” Redmond said. “Now we’ll have room for lab work and meetings.”
While the Amherst center will house “a few exhibits,” its primary mission will be hands-on research by archaeology professors, researchers and students, according to Redmond. The Firelands group will work with professors and others in the archaeological program at the University of Toledo who have taken part in local digs.
“This will be a central place for all those groups to come together with what they’ve collected from those excavations,” Redmond said. “We’ll be able to have everything washed, catalogued and inventoried for study.”
The Firelands region, which includes Lorain County, is a good source of prehistoric finds, owing to the relatively large populations that lived along the Black, Vermilion and Huron rivers, dating back nearly 12,000 years.
“There are literally hundreds of archaeological sites” in a region that was home to as many as 100,000 before the arrival of Europeans in the 1600s, Redmond said.
Contact Steve Fogarty at 329-7146 or sfogarty@chroniclet.com.
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Filed by Steve Fogarty | The Chronicle-Telegram October 11th, 2008 in Local and State. Popularity: 1% |
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