McFate Archaeological Site — Mapping the Ancient French Creek Valley

At the Cochranton Landing along the French Creek, archaeologists found something that rewrote what we know about this valley's ancient past. The McFate Archaeological Site contains not one but three overlapping palisaded villages, each constructed inside or adjacent to the last, a layered record of community life spanning from about eleven hundred to fifteen hundred years after the common era.

The people who lived here were seasonal hunters, gatherers, and farmers who built stockaded villages for protection and community. Their pottery tells the most detailed part of their story. The distinctive ceramic style found here, with incised geometric patterns now called McFate Incised, has served as an archaeological fingerprint. By tracing where this same pottery appears at other sites, researchers have been able to reconstruct trade routes and migration patterns across a surprisingly large landscape.

The pottery style takes its name from the site. For archaeologists working to understand the pre-contact peoples of northwestern Pennsylvania, Cochranton Landing has become a reference point, a place where the soil held four centuries of human decisions waiting to be read.