But he and his team -- a gathering of Towson students and trained volunteers from the Western Maryland chapter of the Archaeological Society of Maryland -- continue to marvel at the secrets yielded up by this land, which has been bought and will be permanently preserved by the Archaeological Conservancy, an Albuquerque-based nonprofit group, with help from the Maryland Historical Trust.
They have found 300-year-old trade beads of blue and white glass dating back to the "contact period" when white settlers and explorers first traded with the native Susquehannock people.
Robert Wall and crew members search for artifacts to prove that people lived in the area earlier than believed.
(James M. Thresher -- The Washington Post)
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They have found fragments of pottery made 1,000 to 2,000 years ago in the woodland period, when people were learning to farm and store food.
They have found 3,000- to 4,000-year-old spear points left by roaming hunters of the Archaic period.
And John Domenic, one of the devoted amateur archaeologists digging in Western Maryland with Wall, found a Clovis point sticking up out of this very bean field.
Because it was found out of context, it is not the kind of artifact that can be tied definitively to one of the layers of earth now being painstakingly dug by Wall and his team. But its distinctive style -- the point was clearly made and last used by a hunter 10,000 or more years ago -- still bore traces of the last Ice Age.
"The glacier was still up in Pennsylvania," marvels one of the team, Roy Brown of Cumberland. "There were probably caribou. And we know from excavations in Virginia, there were musk ox."
And on this warm Sunday, six feet down, Wall and his crew find a small handful of stone chips. Someone, maybe an Ice Age hunter, sat here by his ancient fire and made a tool.
"We have this hearth feature and this little pile of flakes," Wall says. "It's incredible, like someone just left."
