Late Archaic Flaked Stone Artifacts on Lake Erie’s Western Basin Southern Shore, in and around the Cedar Point National Wildlife Refuge Complex, Oak Harbor, Ohio
Metin I. Eren, Ron Huffman, Tara Bostater, Brian G. Redmond, and Michelle R. Bebber
Abstract
Several water-worn Late Archaic artifacts were found on the Lake Erie coast in or near the Cedar Point National Wildlife Refuge. We describe these artifacts and note their context relative to other Late Archaic occupations in the immediate area. These artifacts signify the need to survey and conserve the remaining lakeshore/beach ridge landforms in the western basin of Lake Erie and their still extant archaeological components.
Introduction
Professional archaeologists and citizen scientists have regularly documented archaeological finds on the shores of Lake Erie (Stothers and Abel 2001). Given that Lake Erie’s water level did not reach its modern shoreline until about 5000-4500 radiocarbon years BP (Lewis et al. 2012), some of these finds likely washed onto shore from Paleoindian, Archaic, and Woodland sites that are currently under water. Other archaeological finds, however, may have eroded out of buried terrestrial sites near the present-day shoreline. Here, we describe nine definite and four possible flaked stone artifacts found on Lake Erie’s southwestern shoreline beach, part of which is within Ohio’s Cedar Point National Wildlife Refuge (CPNWR) (Figure 1).
