Shawnee-Minisink, Thirteen Thousand Years at the Delaware

At the confluence of the Delaware River and Brodhead Creek in Monroe County sits one of the oldest reliably dated Native American sites in the northeastern United States. The Shawnee-Minisink site is nearly thirteen thousand years old, placing it at the very end of the last Ice Age, when glaciers still gripped the landscape to the north.

Archaeologists excavating here uncovered stone tools clustered around a series of ancient campfires. More surprising were the remains of fish and wild fruit, evidence that the site's earliest inhabitants had a more varied diet than researchers had assumed for Paleo-Indian peoples of this period. The site sits near the well-known Minisink battleground of the Revolutionary War, but the story beneath the surface is far older, a reminder that human presence in Pennsylvania stretches back to the edge of the Ice Age.