Canfield Island — Five Thousand Years of Fishing the West Branch
Pennsylvania
In the West Branch Susquehanna River east of Williamsport, a small island sits in the current much as it has for thousands of years. Canfield Island is not large or dramatic, but what lies beneath its surface represents one of the longest continuous records of human occupation in Pennsylvania. The site has been inhabited, on and off, for thousands of years, and one fragment from the lowest excavated level may even date to the Early Archaic period.
The defining discovery at Canfield Island was not a ceremonial object or a burial. It was a kitchen. Excavators found massive hearths, charcoal deposits from fire pits that had been used repeatedly over centuries, associated with large quantities of fishing net weights. The evidence pointed to a site that functioned primarily as a commercial fishery, a place where people came seasonally to harvest the extraordinary runs of shad, sturgeon, and other species that migrated up the Susquehanna in numbers that would seem almost unimaginable today.
The river at this point was a kind of funnel. Fish moving upstream through the West Branch had to navigate the shallows and riffles at this stretch, and an island in mid-current was a natural platform from which to deploy nets. Generations of people recognized the geography and returned to the same spot, adding their charcoal and their debris to the layers below. The charcoal at Canfield Island has become scientifically important in its own right: because it spans multiple dated phases, it has provided a calibration baseline that researchers have used to date charcoal found at other sites across the state.
The site was identified in nineteen fifty-eight and placed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-two. Lycoming College in Williamsport carried out excavations in two thousand three that clarified the sequence of occupation. Today the island is a park, used by people fishing the same stretch of river where their predecessors netted fish thousands of years earlier.
