Radar might solve Stockade mystery

SCHENECTADY — After hundreds — or maybe thousands — of years, the mystery of a pile of cobblestones in the city’s historic Stockade section is expected to be resolved today.

The pile of stones buried five feet underground may turn out to be the oldest foundation uncovered in the Stockade. Or it may be a critical clue in the geologic development of the riverbank. Scientists will bring in radar equipment to figure out which is the case.

“Both are important to know,” said Ron Kingsley, the archaeologist who uncovered the stones late last year.

He and his students at Schenectady County Community College have been painstakingly excavating a pit next to the Yates House for seven years now, in search of information about how the original Schenectadians lived. Their houses were largely destroyed in the 1690 massacre in which Native Americans and French soldiers set fire to the colony.

“We don’t know what the houses looked like. We don’t know what they did with their backyards in a stockaded, urban environment in the 17th century,” Kingsley said. “What was their lifestyle? Did they have fancy dishes or very primitive stuff?”

He thought he had some of those questions answered until he found cobblestones last October.

It was the last day of the year’s dig, and he had slowly sifted through eight inches of “sterile soil” — an archaeology term for dirt without even a trace of human influence.

“I was ready to say this is it, there’s no more, let’s close it up,” he said. “And then I hit a cobblestone.”

He uncovered 30 to 40 stones, in a pile shaped like a corner. His students in SCCC’s Community Archaeology Program were thrilled.

They quickly dug around the pile, searching for artifacts that would tell them the stones had been laid by humans. They found nothing.

But Kingsley’s find kept growing. As he brushed off each stone, leaving them in place, he found more and more beneath them.

“It got wider and wider,” he said. “There’s no artifacts around it, but it looks manmade.”

Finally, he breathed the words his students were thinking: “It may be a cobblestone foundation.”

That flies in the face of everything his crew has discovered over the past seven years. The earliest traces they found of houses were two structures built without foundations.

One showed signs of burning, a good indication that it was the original building that was destroyed during the 1690 massacre. Kingsley had identified the burned remains as the original structure.

Traces of another building behind it seem to be of a similar age, although there was no sign of a fire there. He’d figured that was a barn.

In both cases, it was clear there was no foundation.

“They brought river sand in, six to eight inches of yellow-orange sand, and laid it on top of the original soil for good drainage,” he said. “Then they laid the building on the ground. Very primitive construction. They laid boards on the sand, unattached boards. They would lay their floorboards on that. We have found stains on those floorboards in the yellow sand.”

To go along with the primitive construction, his crew has found crude bowls that were commonly used by “humble” people, he said.

That appeared to answer many of the questions about the early Dutch community, painting a picture of people eking out a living in very primitive conditions.

Then he found the cobblestones.

“I don’t know how that got there,” he said. “They would have to have been brought up from a river.”

Possibly the same colonists who carried up yellow river sand brought in the stones. But Kingsley doesn’t think so.

“If we’d found artifacts we would have been suspicious,” he said. “If there had been just one artifact ...”

But if humans didn’t carry up the rocks from the river and carefully pile them, what did?

“It may be a glacial formation,” Kingsley said. “There may have been shifting over time. I think it’s natural because there have been no artifacts.”

But he can’t get over the number of stones he found.

“It’s very unusual,” he said.

Today, the answer should be revealed.

Two scientists from the New York State Museum Geological Survey Department will use ground-penetrating radar to see how far the pile of rocks extends underground.

A continuous printout should make it immediately clear that the rocks are a natural, haphazard pile or a manmade design.

“If he finds a line and says, ‘That doesn’t look natural,’ that’s all we need to know,” Kingsley said. “If they say it could be, I can’t let that pass. We’ll have to do more digging.”

But if, as he suspects, the rock pile was formed thousands of years before the Dutch arrived, it will still be a significant discovery.

“It would be marvelous if we can start to find out more about how this land formed over thousands of years,” he said. “But I seem to be the sole voice saying it could be natural.”