Prehistoric Rock Shelters

Beginning about 1000 B.C., local American Indian tribes used these rock shelters as temporary places to stay while hunting and gathering food. Although they had adopted agriculture by that time, they supplemented their diet with wild plants and animals. Discarded tools found near the shelters reflect food-related activities including hunting animals, butchering meat, and gathering edible plants, fruits, berries, nuts, and seeds. Typical discarded bones include white-tailed deer, fox, woodchuck, rabbit, squirrel, turtle, snake, fish, turkey, duck, and passenger pigeon. Plant evidence suggests these peoples gathered wild seeds and nuts such as acorn and history, and a variety of tubers. By A.D. 1607, all these peoples had been pushed out, leaving Montgomery County a no man's land, a buffer between southern Maryland Algonquians, northern Iroquois, and western Sioux and Shawnee Indians. Archaeologists have yet to solve the mystery of their origins and fate.

Kemp Mill, Maryland · United States