Four thousand years ago there were already people going about their business in the District of Columbia, hunter-gatherers moving with the seasons, and attracted to the Potomac in springtime by the annual fish run. Fish swimming upstream to spawn are easiest to harvest where the river gets narrow, above Georgetown, and archeologists have discovered the site of a prehistoric fishing camp near Potomac Avenue in Palisades. A century ago antiquarians had already noticed that it was worth their while to search newly-plowed fields in that vicinity, because so many spear points and the like were turned up by the plow. These same amateur archeologists also noticed that there were ancient quarries in the ravines of nearby tributaries of the Potomac (including Foundry Branch, in Glover-Archbold Park, and College Run or Beech Brook, a stream no longer on the map, whose branches are now storm-drains under 37th and 39th Streets). These quarries were places that prehistoric people had discovered, where seams of quartzite, or of steatite, were exposed by erosion, and could efficiently be mined to produce tools and weapons.

The first stone-quarriers were (perhaps) the ancestors of the people we think of as Indians, but they differed from their descendants in several ways; among other things, Late Archaic people did not engage in horticulture, and they did not use the bow-and-arrow. Their weapon was the spear-thrower, or atlatl, which operated on the sensible principle that if a man could somehow grow a really long arm, he would be able to throw a spear a lot further. The atlatl was an arm extension, and the components for this weapons system were manufactured here. (Robert L.Humphrey and Mary Elizabeth Chambers, with an afterword by Stephen R. Potter. Ancient Washington: American Indian Cultures of the Potomac Valley. GW Washington Studies No.6, second edition, George Washington University, 1977)

The stones extracted in the ravine were turned into finished products on the plateau above the ravine. Were Glover Park still undeveloped, archeologists would now regard it as a likely place to look for evidence of Late Archaic camps, such as fire-pits and burial sites. Obviously, the extensive grading and filling that was done to prepare for construction of streets and houses obliterated any archeological potential there might have been; only the stream beds in what is now park land still have relatively undisturbed Late Archaic work sites, and to keep them that way the Park Service does not point them out. It is illegal to commit archaeology on parkland without a permit. Of course, only a true archaeologist would find what is still lying around here of interest since it consists entirely of rejects; ancient manufacturers of stone implements took all the good stuff with them when they left.

To turn a rock into a useful object, it was reduced and shaped by “knapping”, i.e. chipping at it with other stone tools. Many rocks were rejected after only a few whacks, if they didn’t break just right. Since prehistoric quarries and workshops were active for thousands of years, accumulations of such chipped cobblestones were so plentiful in some stream beds in the District of Columbia, that many were carted away in the 1880’s and used for surfacing city streets. The archeologist William Henry Holmes was led to observe, with only slight exaggeration, that the nation’s capital was “paved with the art remains of a race who had occupied its site in the shadowy past”.

Carlton Fletcher (This article by originally appeared in the Glover Park Gazette, December, 1995, as “Ancient History”. All rights reserved.)