Harvard Diggers Find America's Oldest Dwellings

An expedition sponsored by the Peabody Museum and the National Geographic Society has discovered the oldest known houses in the Western Hemisphere.

The party, led by Museum Director John O. Brew, Peabody Professor of American Archaeology and Ethnology, found the remains of two Indian huts at Hell Gap near Guernsey, Wyoming. The huts were built 10,000 years ago, 6000 years before the oldest previously dated houses. Until the recent discovery archaeologists believed that the early Indians were strictly nomadic.

Brew described the remains as "overlapping circles of postholes that were formed by the butts of upright branches used to make the shelter." The prehistoric huts were probably "much like a modern Apache wikiup, a type of Indian hut used in the West," Brew said.

The site of the remains is a secluded valley protected by high cliffs. The valley had a convenient supply of water and game. A nearby flint quarry provided material for stone tools.

Inhabited in 9000 B.C.

The Hell Gap site has been under excavation for the past five years. The archaeologists have found artifacts there that provide evidence of occupation "considerably" before 9000 B.C. Scholars say that the Indians of the Hell Gap area produced some of the finest examples of flint tools in North America. Many of these tools were discovered on the floors of the two huts.

There has been continuous habitation of the Hell Gap area since late glacial times, according to age determinations made by the radiocarbon method.

The expedition's field party was jointly directed by Henry T. Irwin, Junior Fellow, and Cynthia Irwin-Williams and George A. Agonino of Eastern New Mexico University. Many Harvard and Radcliffe students were also members of the party.