American Rescue Plan Grant

According to Eugene Jones, an esteemed archeologist and instructor at Concord College, the first archeological investigation of the Snidow site was done by Father Clifford Lewis of Wheeling Jesuit College in the spring of 1965 (Jones 1989, “Shawnee Lake-Its Archeology Thru 1988”).

That summer West Virginia State Archeologist Dr. Edward McMichael’s limited excavations on a BJuestone River terrace found what appeared to be a Fort Ancient village. In 1975 Eugene Jones did additional testing that showed that the village had a palisade and encircled a 305 foot by 225 foot area. In 1987 and 1988 Marshall University field schools under the direction of Dr. Nicholas Freidin and Virginia State Archeologist Howard MacCord opened up a larger area and verified the presence of a medium-sized palisaded and nucleated Fort Ancient village on the terrace.

In 1987, during the first Marshall University field school, the landowner bulldozed a 40 foot wide by 450 foot long by 4 foot deep cut on the Bluestone River :floodplain below the viUage to construct a “mud bog drag strip.” The bulldozing exposed deep and dense deposits that included burials, storage pits, hearths, fire pits, post molds and other features dating to the Late Prehistoric to Contact periods. In 1988 Eugene Jones invited then-University of North Carolina doctoral student David Fuerst to observe the Marshall University excavations and survey the damage the bulldozing had done to the Late Prehistoric and Contact period archeological deposits on the floodplain below the viUage. He also tinned over to Fuerst artifacts he and his students collected from what he referred to as the Sand Dragstrip area of the Snidow site (46MC1-3).

In 1989 the emergency archeological investigation Fuerst conducted there revealed important information about the Native American people who lived in western Virginia during the late 16111 to early I 7th century. With support from Concord College and a local travel group, he and his two person team mapped the features on the floor and wall of the bulldozer cut and recovered late Fort Ancient mussel she11-tempered, Radford limestone-tempered, and what it defined as Crab Orchard snail shell-tempered pottery. The investigation also recovered triangular arrowpoints, notched spear points, endscrapers and other chipped stone tools, a stone celt, a sandstone mortar, hammerstones, abrading stones, cut bone and shell disk beads, marginella and olivella shell beads, tubular bone beads, a bone beamer, an antler cleaver, deer, turkey, turtle, elk, bear, and wolf bone, and carbonized nutshell, com cobs, com kernels, and other plant remains. Fine sieve water screening of the feature fill also recovered European glass beads and brass, copper, and iron artifacts, which indicated that Snidow is the earliest contact period site in southern West Virginia and one that was contemporaneous with other Contact period sites in the upper Roanoke, upper Holston, and lower New River drainages of western Virginia (Fuerst 1992, 1996, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2011).