1 Prehistoric Times Our Landscape and First People The countryside along the Hudson River and throughout Greene County always has been a lure for settlers and speculators. Newcomers and longtime residents find the waterway, its tributaries, the Catskills, and our hills and valleys a primary reason for living and enjoying life here. New Baltimore and its surroundings were formed and massaged by the dynamic forces of nature, the result of ongoing geologic events over millions of years.1 The most prominent geographic features in the region came into being during what geologists called the Paleozoic era, nearly 550 million years ago. It was a time when continents collided and parted, causing upheavals that pushed vast land masses into hills and mountains and complementing lowlands. The Kalkberg, the spiny ridge running through New Baltimore, is named for one of the rock layers formed in ancient times. Immense seas covered much of New York and served as collect- ing pools for sediments that consolidated into today’s rock formations. The only animals around were simple forms of jellyfish, sponges, and arthropods with their characteristic jointed legs and exoskeletons, like grasshoppers and beetles. The next integral formation event happened 1.6 million years ago during the Pleistocene epoch when the Laurentide ice mass developed in Canada. This continental glacier grew unyieldingly, expanding south- ward and retreating several times, radically altering the landscape time and again as it traveled. Greene County was buried. Only the highest 5 © 2011 State University of New York Press, Albany 6 / Episodes from a Hudson River Town peak of the Catskills, Ulster County’s 4,200-foot Slide Mountain, may have poked up out of the frozen terrain. So much water was consumed by the glaciations that seas were a few hundred feet lower than today. The latest significant geologic activity that defined today’s landscape was during the Wisconsinan age with the last advance and retreat of the Laurentide ice formation. This icy accumulation covered all but a tiny sliver of New York about 22,000 years BP (i.e., before present, a com- mon archaeological designation for time) and was gone from the state 10,000 years BP. As the sheet melted, debris dammed outlets and led to the flooding of great glacial pools, including Lake Albany. This massive body of water existed between 15,000 and 10,000 BP, covering the Hudson River Valley area from near Lake George all the way down to around Staten Island. As Lake Albany dried, it left hills and valleys and great deposits of silt, sand, and clay, which proved valuable for future residents in making pottery, ceramics, and bricks. This is the landscape much as we see it today after thousands of years of weathering and erosion. The remains of the sandy bottom of the lake still are very apparent in Albany’s Pine Bush preserve. Some beach-like areas along the Hudson, particularly on the east side, also are remnants of Lake Albany. One major by-product of the land shifting and upheavals and extensive glaciations was the creation of great stores of valuable chert and flint deposits that provided the earliest human arrivals with an important resource. Chert is a fine-grained, sedimentary rock related to quartz, with flint being a subcategory. The material is very hard yet susceptible to glass-like fracturing, making it well suited for crafting stone tools that were critical for survival in prehistoric times. The rock’s hardness makes it very resistant to weathering and deterioration, which is why almost everyone seems to have either found or seen an old arrowhead. Our First Human Residents The cycle of long periods of icing and warming made the area rather uninviting, particularly when coupled with the large and hungry feral animals that roamed the wilderness. As early people gained basic tools, skins for warmth, and weapons for protection and food gathering, they were equipped to overcome such obstacles and move from their native Europe and Asia to exploit the abundant natural resources of the lands of North America. © 2011 State University of New York Press, Albany Prehistoric Times / 7 Solid information about prehistoric times is sketchy and based broadly on examination of geologic features and fossil remains, the types of stone tools used by people at different times, and the use of more exotic scientific methods such as radiocarbon and radiometric dating. The evidence points to about 11,000 BP as the date for the first human habitation of the Greene County and New Baltimore areas, right as the ice and water finally left. How people got here is subject to much ongoing guesswork. The initial feelings were that adventuresome travelers came across Beringia. This long-submerged strip of land linking Asia with Alaska had been created by the lowered sea levels caused by the ice ages. Some researchers now believe that people could have come in makeshift, seagoing water craft, landing at a range of possible locations along the west coast. The newcomers then took hundreds of years to trek across North America, perhaps in search of viable food sources. The arrival of people to our area was rather late in the game. Discoveries in Africa date man’s ancestors there to be six million or more years old. Our people do not even match up well with the earliest relics of human life in the rest of North America, which date anywhere from 12,500 to 20,000 BP. As New York was recovering from the last ice age, the land became tundra-like with clumps of foliage and various grasses and ground cover. Pine, hardwood forests, and other woods and brush were becoming rees- tablished after the long period of icy cover. With the fresh vegetation came new sources of nuts, berries, and other nourishment that attracted foraging caribou, elk, deer, mastodonts, bears, giant beavers, wolves, and turkeys. Richer aquatic life also was appearing so fishing was increas- ingly possible. All these factors combined to provide incentive for human residence. Who Were These Earliest People? The Paleo-Indians were the first arrivals to America. These people are thought to have been hunters about 8,000 to 13,000 years BP who wandered the countryside in small groups to discover whatever adequate food supplies existed. 2 As the people adopted more complex ways of life, researchers assigned other names to the groups to differentiate them. The last ancient settlers, the Woodland people, appeared about 3,000 BP in eastern North America and lasted nearly to the time of first European contact. They differed © 2011 State University of New York Press, Albany 8 / Episodes from a Hudson River Town from older classification groups primarily through their more sophisticated development of pottery and agriculture (particularly growing of the three staple crops of corn, beans, and squash) and the use of funerary mounds, earthen works to entomb their dead. The Woodland people are the direct ancestors of the more familiar Mohicans who dominated much of the Hudson Valley for many years. Archaeologists have found the mid- and upper-Hudson region, including Greene County, to hold many treasures documenting prehistoric man, starting with the Paleo-Indian culture and extending through to the arrival of the first Europeans. The most familiar and renowned sites may be Flint Mine Hill in the town of Coxsackie and West Athens Hill in the town of Athens. New Baltimore was part of Coxsackie until the State legalized it as a separate municipality in 1811. Another major finding was made at the Goldkrest site just north of New Baltimore across the Hudson River at Rensselaer County’s East Greenbush. Flint Mine Hill For many years, amateur relic hunters had been digging on the ridge just south of the village of Coxsackie looking for arrowheads and other stony artifacts. In 1921, state archaeologist Arthur C. Parker started to investigate the plot of land that he had been eyeing for quite a while. Called Flint Mine Hill, this site was viewed as an Indian quarrying loca- tion for a considerable period, but no organized scientific investigation had been done. What Parker discovered was “the most remarkable archeological monument in the state of New York. It was literally a mountain of arrowheads!”3 Employing much hyperbole and poetic waxing, Parker wrote the first widespread documentation of the importance of the site. Flint Mine Hill still ranks as one of the largest chert quarries ever uncovered in the East. In the mid-1990s, a team from the State University of New York at Albany found remains of tools used in the production process and tools that were end products themselves. The objects dated from about 3,400 to 5,000 BP back to the Paleo-Indians, suggesting that the site had been used as a quarrying workshop for thousands of years.4 West Athens Hill In 1962, a local resident, R. Arthur Johnson, was poking around on a hill in Athens after hearing that a telecommunications tower was to be © 2011 State University of New York Press, Albany Prehistoric Times / 9 constructed on the site. Johnson began to notice significant deposits of flint and other evidence subsequently dated back to the Paleo-Indian culture. Professional archaeologists were called in, and research of the area has continued since that time. Perched four hundred feet above its surroundings, West Athens Hill turned out to be the largest Paleo-Indian stone tool quarrying and manufacturing workshop and possible residential site found to date in New York State. The location is one of the most well-documented Paleo-Indian sites in the East. A key researcher throughout this period was longtime state archaeologist Robert E.