The Roundtop Site

In the Susquehanna River Valley of New York state in the northeastern United States, lies a large late Woodland (AD 1000-1300) village site called Roundtop. First excavated in 1964 by William Ritchie of the New York State Museum, and again in the early 1970s, Roundtop proved to be a large settlement, with over 200 pit features (storage or refuse pits excavated into the ground by the inhabitants) and hundreds of post molds (small circular soil discolorations which are evidence of poles used to build houses and other buildings).

Most interesting at the site was the recovery of corn, beans, and squash from the same pit feature. Feature 35, a large storage pit, contained maize kernels and cob fragments, beans, and squash seeds together with the rim of a pottery vessel in a style called Carpenter Brook Cord-on-Cord, a type normally dated to the Early Owasco period, or early Late Woodland.

The Owasco culture is one of three recognized cultural groups living in the area in this period (and named by archaeologists), the other two being Clemsons Island and Shenks Ferry. Each group is identified on the basis of their ceramic assemblage--that is, by the decoration on their pottery vessels. While at the time there wasn't adequate charcoal to test Feature 35, a radiocarbon date on another feature at Roundtop--Feature 30--came back 1070 AD +/- 60; and this evidence together convinced Ritchie that the Owasco people at the Roundtop site conducted the earliest intercropping of all three staples in the American northeast; and indeed, were the first to cultivate beans as well.

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