4.5 Latest Research on the Peopling of North America: Parsons Island and the Chesapeake Bay

Dr. Darrin Lowery, Director of Chesapeake Watershed Archaeological Research Foundation, supported by the Maryland Historical Trust, the Smithsonian Institution.

http://cwar.org/About/default.html

https://si.academia.edu/DarrinLowery

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Darrin-Lowery

Publication:

Lowery, D.L. 2021. Parsons Island, Maryland: Synthesis of Geoarchaeological Investigations, 2013-2020. Chesapeake Watershed Archaeological Research Foundation, the Maryland Historical Trust, the Smithsonian Institution.

On May 20th, 2013, Dr. John Wah and myself visited Parsons Island, Maryland (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2). The expedition on that day represented my second excursion to Parsons in twenty-one years. My first visit to Parsons occurred in 1992 as part of a collective multi-year archaeological survey of the Kent Island area (see Lowery 1993), which was conducted for the Kent Island Heritage Society, the University of Delaware, and the Maryland Historical Trust. In 1992, Parsons Island encompassed 99-acres (see Figure 1.2) and when we re-visited the island in 2013, the island had eroded to ~78-acres. In 2019, the island had been reduced to ~71-acres and presently Parsons consists of ~69-acres. The perimeter of exposed shoreline also changed markedly during this period of time. In 1992, the island had 2.11 linear miles (3.4 km or 11,159 feet) of coastline and by 2019 the amount of coastline had been reduced to 1.65 linear miles (2.66 km or 8,716 feet). Over the twenty-seven-year period, the island has collectively lost about one-acre of land per year to coastal erosion. With the gradual reduction in linear miles of shoreline over this period, it is clear that the rate of annual land loss has actually increased in recent years. Notably, most of the land loss is focused along the island’s southwest margin.

Our re-visit to Parsons Island on May 20th, 2013 (see Figure 1.3), originated as a result of our late Pleistocene stratigraphic and geoarchaeological investigations conducted at nearby Miles Point, Talisman Farm, and Barnstable Hill (see Figure 1.4). The collective research conducted at Parsons Island over the succeeding seven years culminated into a better understanding of the Middle Atlantic’s Paleo-American archaeological record (see Figure 1.4), a higher-resolution evaluation of the region’s late Pleistocene upland stratigraphy, and a means to quantify some of the site formation processes along eroding coastal margins. This monograph synthesizes the results of these investigations. Regardless of the possible age of the Paleo-American record noted at Parsons Island, the primary objective has always been salvage. Some “academicians” and a few “cultural resource managers” view investigations at eroding coastal archaeological sites in the Chesapeake Bay region as being “biased” and “anecdotal” (see Custer 2018: 202). It should be obvious, the erosive effects by the estuarine water of the Chesapeake Bay are unbiased and these waters will indiscriminately destroy both historic sites, as well as prehistoric sites. The results of our collective investigation at Parsons Island also proves that if follow-up investigations are made at “untrustworthy” (Ibid) sites, “anecdotal” discoveries can make major contributions to the regional, as well as North America’s geoarchaeological record.

In 2019, the Chesapeake Watershed Archaeological Research foundation applied for a non-capital grant from the Maryland Historical Trust. The goal of the proposal was to synthesize all of the prior work at Parsons Island, document the island’s archaeological record, and conduct limited excavations inland of the shoreline at 18QU1047 to determine if any in-situ cultural deposits remained.

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