A Modified Rockshelter in Northwood Meadows State Park in New Hampshire
On A NEARA Fall Conference Field Trip in November 2024
The NEARA (New England Antiquities Research Association) Fall 2024 Conference in Manchester, New Hampshire brought with it two days of Field Trips, along with a day and evening of indoor talks and presentations.
Friday afternoon, we visited America’s Stonehenge in Salem, New Hampshire, as you’ve likely seen in my earlier posts:
On Sunday, I joined NEARA’s New Hampshire State Coordinator, Devon Toland, for stops at New Hampshire’s Bear Brook State Park in Candia and Northwood Meadows State Park in Northwood, with a side trip to a Receiving Tomb Stone Chamber in Deerfield whose location Devon had tracked down. I’ve shared the Receiving Tomb Stone Chamber in prior posts:
Devon tracked down this Modified Rockshelter as well, based on old reports. Though silted in, now, and full of leaves, pinecones and plenty of animal poop, this space would have once provided a person with a night’s shelter. A “window” gives a view of Saddleback Mountain.
Here’s a little uncut video to get a better idea of the space:
This clip takes you around the side we haven’t yet seen:
Humans have been using Rockshelters for as long as we’ve been human. We know Indigenous peoples in the northeast were modifying their Rockshelters with stone at least 4000 years ago, thanks to a 4000 year-old stone wall found in a Rockshelter in the Flagg Swamp in Marlborough, Massachusetts back in the late 1970’s. Further south, below the extent of the ice sheets of the Ice Age in Western Pennsylvania at the Meadowcroft Rockshelter, they found evidence of human habitation going back 19,000 years. Rockhelters can date back a long way.
I don’t know if any serious research has yet been done to determine the age of this one. Devon didn’t know of any, either. It might make a good candidate for an archaeological dig — though I wouldn’t want to be the one digging through that stuff on the bottom of the shelter, to be honest.