Washington Boro: Eleven Thousand Years on the Susquehanna
Near York, Pennsylvania
The ground around Washington Boro holds a rich concentration of archaeological sites. People have lived along this stretch of the Susquehanna River for thousands of years, leaving behind everything from small hunting camps to sprawling villages. The most significant settlements belonged to the Susquehannocks, a powerful confederacy that dominated the fur trade in this region.
At their peak, the Susquehannocks controlled commerce across a vast territory, but by sixteen seventy-five a combination of warfare and epidemic disease had broken that power. The archaeology here has been invaluable to researchers, filling in centuries of Native American lifeways that written records never captured. In a quiet river town in Lancaster County, the soil holds an almost unbroken human story stretching back thousands of years.
