Meadowcroft Rockshelter: Oldest Human Presence in North America

Meadowcroft Rockshelter, in the hills of Washington County, holds one of the most significant archaeological records on earth. Found by Albert Miller in nineteen fifty-five and excavated from nineteen seventy-three by University of Pittsburgh archaeologists, the site contains deeply stratified deposits which may span sixteen thousand years or more of human occupation. At its oldest layers, Meadowcroft revealed disputed evidence of human presence that may predate the widely accepted arrival timeline for the Americas, making it one of the key sites in the debate over when and how people first entered the New World.

Every major cultural stage of eastern North American prehistory appears in its remarkably complete record. Today Meadowcroft is a National Historic Landmark, and its stone overhang still shelters visitors the way it sheltered people who lived here thousands of years before the first European set foot on this continent.