The Mead Island People — Woodland Period of the Allegheny Valley

In nineteen sixty-seven, Carnegie Museum archaeologist Dr. Stanley Lantz was excavating on Mead Island in the Allegheny River when he found evidence of a previously unidentified culture. The people he encountered in the soil had lived along the Middle Allegheny River Valley during the early Late Woodland period, roughly between nine hundred sixty and thirteen sixty years after the common era.

Further excavations at the nearby Penelec site and at other locations stretching from this area south to Freeport in Armstrong County confirmed the same distinctive pattern. The Mead Island culture was not a small or isolated group. They appear to have been the dominant inhabitants of this stretch of the Allegheny for several centuries.

Archaeologists identify them primarily through their material culture, the shapes and styles of their tools and pottery. Like many Woodland period peoples of the Northeast, they moved seasonally through the landscape, relying on hunting, gathering wild plants, and limited farming. The Mead Island designation, named for the island where the culture was first identified, now serves as the archaeological label for an entire chapter of human life along this river corridor, a chapter that otherwise left no written word.