This illustration shows the circular village structure that archaeologists think was typical of the Monongahela tradition, based on evidence uncovered over 70 years of digging in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.
This 2007 photograph captures the sweeping vista of Fort Hill and the Casselman River—areas where archaeologists have, since the 1930s, uncovered evidence of the Monongahela tradition.
Photo by: Bernard Means
Imagine you’re alive 12,000 years from now. It’s the year 14,020. On an archaeological dig, several plastic shopping bags and an old cell phone battery are discovered a yard away from a long strip of asphalt. Using technology we can only dream of, they discover that the artifacts are from the year 2020. If this was all you had—nothing that says United States of America or Pennsylvania—what would you call this culture?
Western Pennsylvania has been peopled for the past 12,000 years. In Somerset County, archaeologists have found artifacts like stone spear points that date back to the Paleoindian period (10,000–16,500 B.C.) at upland sites along the Casselman River. Understandably, very few of these artifacts remain to be found. The most documented period—the one that has been best studied and written about—is the prehistoric period (~1050–1510 A.D.). [1]
In the 1930s, archaeologists began digging around Somerset County and found evidence of a past peoples who lived in the area from approximately 1050 A.D. until 1635. Archaeologist Mary Butler—the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in the subject from the University of Pennsylvania, in 1936—studied artifacts from these digs and determined that the peoples who made them had distinct material cultures from the known American Indian groups in the region—the Delaware, Shawnee and Miami. “We know that in historic times the Delaware and Shawnee occupied the country west of the Alleghenies as late as 1794,” she wrote in the conclusion to her study. “But these Delawares and Shawnees had been driven from coastal and southern territory early in the eighteenth century by the westward thrust of the white settlers.”
This illustration shows the circular village structure that archaeologists think was typical of the Monongahela tradition, based on evidence uncovered over 70 years of digging in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.
Illustration by Laura Galke | courtesy Bernard Means
She continued, “The Miami lived in central Ohio in the seventeenth century… [and] Delaware tradition says that in the distant past when their people pushed east to the coast across the Ohio and the territory of the Alligewi, some of them stayed behind.” Unfortunately, Butler concluded, the "archaeological material does not in its outstanding characteristics resemble known Delaware material."
Without much to go on, local geography offered archaeologists a name for the shared traditions of these past people: the Monongahela tradition, after the Monongahela River. [2] The Monongahela tradition is a creation of archeologists; it’s still not known whether the peoples who lived here for 600 years before European contact considered themselves a unified group or formed extended kinship networks through marriage. Calling it a tradition recognizes that there was likely variation over time and space in how these peoples lived.
Archaeologists have discovered a lot more about the peoples of the Monongahela tradition since the 1930s. William C. Johnson and Bernard K. Means describe them as “egalitarian farmers who intensively farmed maize and other crops, such as beans and squash, and who frequently lived in circular villages.” Much of what is known about them has been derived from remnants of their ceramics, clay tobacco pipes, projectile points, bone objects (like awls and fishhooks) and beads. [3] There is recent debate about whether the Monongahela may be related to the Massawomeck tribe, mentioned by European colonizers in their records, but so little is known about the Massawomeck that proving a linkage remains challenging. [4] As Means notes, harkening back to Butler, "A serious limitation on our understanding of the past peoples that once inhabited the Late Prehistoric Northeast is that their affiliations to historically known tribes have been long lost or are ambiguous.” [5] It is believed that by 1635, the Monongahela had dispersed from the area and melded with the Susquehannock, an Iroquoian-speaking tribe who lived further east, along the Susquehanna River. [6]
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