(EDITOR’S NOTE: Today the Sun-Gazette offers the next installment in a weekly history series that tells the stories of those who came before us.)

A native burial mound in Muncy that has struck at the imagination of artifact hunters since the 1700’s traces back to a group of people who lived along the Susquehanna between 800 and 1200 years ago, according to the archeological record.

In 1956, an archeological dig on farmland in Muncy known as the Brock site, by Williamsport’s chapter of the Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology, yielded a variety of artifacts such as triangular arrow points and pottery, according to notes from the dig by the North Central Chapter of the Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology.

Those artifacts lead archaeologists to believe that a culture first discovered on Clemson Island on the Susquehanna River had also lived in Lycoming County, according to the Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology.

In 1769, the first recorded owner and farmer of the land had already known its significance, referring to it as his “Indian grave,” according to “A Chronology of the Brock Site,” by Walter Weaver, in the Thomas T. Taber Museum archives.

Ever since then, treasure hunters of all kinds have visited the site to find artifacts. “One thing is certain, the mound was repeatedly gutted by known and unknown parties long before any scientific exploration was ever attempted,” wrote Weaver in his chronology.

The mound is located south of where Muncy Creek enters the Susquehanna River, “on a river terrace about 165 yards from the north bank of the Susquehanna’s West branch,” wrote Weaver.

According to Thomas Baird, vice president of the North Central Chapter of the Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology, a combination of being farmed over for hundreds of years as well as the history of looters that came to the site has flattened the burial mound.

“The mound is no more,” Baird said. “That’s the problem with mounds (in Pennsylvania) in general. Eventually they just get plowed over.”

According to Baird, the farmland where the mound lies is off limits and the owners of the land do not allow visitors.

Despite the many lootings of the site, archaeologists were still able to pinpoint the significance of the area as a location where people of the Clemson Island culture had lived and died, according to the archaeologists of the Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology who documented the site in 1956.

In the conclusions that archaeologists wrote on the 1956 dig, they hypothesized that inhabitants had lived close to the river and possibly had moved camp for a short amount of time during flood seasons.

“It is assumed that this site was only used for a short period, possibly as a temporary site during a flood … The lower site contains a much richer layer of finds and better signs of occupation,” wrote the archaeologists working at the dig in the file for the site in the Taber Museum archives.

Clemson Island in Halifax Township, Dauphin County, was the first site that archaeologists unearthed remnants from the culture, according to Baird.

A similar style of pottery and arrow head production, the use of corn as a food source, as well as the discovery of burial mounds at many sites from Lock Haven to Wilkes Barre, down the Susquehanna to Clarks Ferry, and along the Juniata River, helped archaeologists understand that they were looking at some form of culture that had lived between 800 and 1200 A.D..

“There are two theories on the origins of Clemson Island … For a long time, archaeologists saw general similarities between Clemson Island and older local pottery types in the Susquehanna Valley,” said Dr. Kurt Carr, senior curator of archaeology for the State Museum of Pennsylvania. “But the more recent theory is that a group of people from Ontario migrated into the region and formed the basis for both Clemson Island and Owasco (New York ancestors of the Iroquois) … The answer is probably a little of both.”

According to The Archaeology of Native Americans in Pennsylvania, a book by Carr and archeologist Dr. Roger Moeller, the Clemson Island people share a number of aspects with northern cultures from that time period like living in small groups and the growing of seed plants mixed with the collection of animals and plant for food.

The Clemson Island people grew mostly corn crops in the flood plain of the Susquehanna, but according to Carr and Moeller, they still mostly sustained themselves on hunting and gathering.

What archaeologists have been able to pinpoint about the Clemson Island people is that they lived mostly in small homesteads, containing one or two houses for a small extended family, that were dispersed along the river. Burial mounds used to store the dead were found at the Clemson Island sites, but they did not seem to be associated with individual households, according to Carr and Moeller, but “served hamlets within a large region of 10 to 20 miles in diameter.”

Unlike other cultures that use burial mounds for their dead, such as the Adena burial mounds in Ohio where men were buried with valuable traded goods that tell of their high status, the Clemson Island people were very minimalist in their burials.

“These burial mounds weren’t like the mounds you find in Ohio where a big man was controlling things,” Carr said. “These weren’t elaborate.”

What is interesting about the Clemson Island people’s use of burial mounds, according to Carr, is that the Adena of Ohio were 1,000 years older than the Clemson Island culture.

“You go from this elaborate burial system,” Carr said. “After 1,000 years, they go back to these burial grounds.”

The Clemson Island people lasted about 500 years, according to Carr, at which point other cultures began to change socially and begin to live in larger groups. There is no proof that the culture as it was between 800 and 1200 A.D. continued to thrive.