Abbott Farm: Twelve Thousand Years on the Delaware

Along the Delaware River just south of Trenton lies one of the most significant archaeological sites in eastern North America: the Abbott Farm Historic District. People have lived here for thousands of years, from Paleo-Indian hunters at the end of the last Ice Age through the Lenape who were here when Europeans arrived. Archaeologist Charles Conrad Abbott began excavating the site in the eighteen seventies and found stone tools he argued were evidence of ice age people, which sparked one of the great debates of nineteenth-century American archaeology about whether humans had inhabited North America in the Pleistocene.

Later work confirmed occupation but pushed back on his specific claims. Today the site is a National Historic Landmark, protecting a farm landscape where the evidence of human presence stretches back to the earliest chapters of American prehistory.