Education: Good Scout

Good Scout

What should pop up in the Hudson Valley last week but Archeology itself. And the ferret that caused the pop was no Archeologist, Ph. D., but a Girl Scout. Ten-year-old Betty Lou Norris of Brooklyn and other Scouts had listened to lectures on Indians, went hunting rock shelters. In one shelter near New York’s Kanawauke Lake, Scout Norris spied charred deer bones. She yipped to her friends; they yipped to William Henry Carr, head of Bear Mountain Trailside Museum. Inured to the “discoveries” of amateur archeologists, he went and had a skeptical look. Whereupon, knowing a prime archeological find, he saw what he thought might be the prize of the Hudson Valley region. Some items:

> A polished Iroquois deer-bone awl six inches long, the first ever found in a Hudson Highlands shelter.

> Red slate Algonquin knives, a 4-lb. Algonquin axhead.

> Some 200 pieces of decorated Iroquois pottery, dating from about 1600.

Roused from their museums, several eminent archeologists scurried to the rock shelter. Copenhagen’s Helge Larsen, now a curator at New York City’s American Museum of Natural History, was heard to observe that the 17th-Century Indians had a lower culture than did the Alaskan Eskimos whose remains he had just been studying. His colleague, Anthropologist Junius B. Bird, was pleased that the girls had made good use of the lectures they had heard.