About 2,000 years ago there was a large inland bay in the area of the Lewes-Rehoboth Canal. People came there for seafood and left behind the traces.
Today, cultural preservation specialists are trying to figure out the story behind the site, known as the Wolfe Neck site, and its bevy of artifacts.
“Every place has a story,” said John McCarthy, cultural preservation specialist for Delaware's Division of Parks and Recreation.
He and a group of volunteers, called the Time Travelers, recently walked about four acres of the nearly 400-acre field looking for artifacts and trying to figure out the “story” of the property.
“Humans are incredibly untidy,” he said.
Over a period of 2,000 years people came back and forth to this area, he said. The volunteers found arrow heads; clam, oyster and welch shells; pottery shards, pieces of colonial-era brick, a couple of grave markers, a pipe stem and a bunch of odd gray rocks.
“Any stone here, was brought here,” said McCarthy, as he pointed out what looked like mortar on the edge of one flattened stone, signs that this area could have been an early colonial homestead. “It’s not native. Why it’s here and what they were doing with it, we don’t know.”
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The group is working to figure out how many people visited the area and over how long a period. The incredible number of artifacts leads some people to think there were many people, but it could just be a small group of people who visited every year. The age, not the number, of artifacts is the key, said McCarthy.
If it were just 10 people and each one lost one thing every year, over the course of a 1,000 years, that’s a lot of stuff, he said. There was a lot of “stuff” to find in the few hours the volunteers walked the area.
John Royle of Ocean View found a Dutch brick, a small, thin, hard brick often used in the interior of Dutch Colonial houses; and a hammer stone used for chipping jasper to make projectile points.
In only his second time as a Time Traveler volunteer, he was very excited. Once he learned what to look for, there were things everywhere, he said.
Others pointed out grave markers they found and showed how large deposits of stone and shell could be clues to campsites and homesteads of the past.
The state is studying this area again because of plans to expand the trail system that runs from Cape Henlopen to Gordon’s Pond and next to this site.
Previous work performed at the site in the 1930s, '40s and '70s, resulted in it being placed on the National Register of Historic Places for the amount of remains from the Early Woodland Period, a prehistoric time dating back as far as 5,000 years ago.
Those studies, though, were performed in what McCarthy called the “analog” era, when people used compasses to map their finds.
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After completing a “surface survey,” walking across the site in systematic transects and marking finds with little flags, the area was mapped using GPS technology. The goal during the recent walk was to determine the “hot spot,” the center of habitation. Because the site was farmed for years, many artifacts have been spread out from plowing.
The group also completed a series of “shovel tests,” digging down to look at layers of soil to see how deep the plowing disturbed the site.
“With tech today, we can learn so much more,” said Ed Otter, one of the volunteers and also an archaeologist out of Salisbury.
In the past if people found something they liked, they just took it home, he said. Now they map where the artifact is before removal. They can test soil samples for pollen to determine the weather in the past and find residue in pottery to learn what people were eating.
Otter was excited by the variety of artifacts found just on the surface. “People were there lots and lots of times. That site goes back to 500 B.C.,” he said.
There will be more studies to piece together the timeline and story of the site, said McCarthy.
“While the general cultural chronology and substance strategy of the Native peoples of the region are fairly well-known, there are many details of everyday life in the past that remain to be fully explored, such as gender roles, and the socio-cultural effects of the changes in climate that resulted in the former inland bays of Cape Henlopen disappearing,” he said.
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