The Indian Occupation
     Of Mother Bedford

We are all sojourners in this land. In the earliest ages only animals laid claim to the hills and valleys of what is today south central Pennsylvania. Currently accepted anthropological opinion states that during the period between thirty and six thousand years B.C., peoples from the Asian Continent entered the North American Continent by way of the now submerged Bering Strait landbridge. It is noted in the book, Smithsonian Book of The North American Indian, that a number of Paleo-Indian sites have been excavated across the Northeast that date to the post-glacial period. One of those sites is the Meadowcroft Rockshelter near present-day Pittsburgh. The Meadowcroft site has been dated to between fourteen and eleven thousand B.C. As I just noted, on the North American Continent the period of the initial migration of peoples into and across the North American Continent is known as the Paleo-Indian era; that period was part of the Stone Age. Those peoples were not native to this continent; nonetheless they moved in and claimed the land for their own. Some regions of the continent were chosen by these peoples as more or less permanent homelands. Other regions remained undisturbed except for occassional hunting forays. Like their Asiatic ancestors, those peoples were generally nomadic and did not believe in "owning" the land as the later European sojourners would.

  The Problem Of Names

  The Tribe

  The Kinship System

  The Land Of The Susquehannock

  The Demise Of The Susquehannock

  The Iroquois Occupation

  Evidence Of Indian Occupation In Mother Bedford