Peace, love and pull tabs – archaeologists dig up Woodstock site as anniversary approaches
Archaeologists have been scouring the grassy hillside famously trampled during the 1969 Woodstock music festival, carefully sifting through the dirt from a time of peace, love, protest and good vibes.
Perhaps they may unearth an old peace symbol? A strand of hippie beads? Jimi Hendrix’s guitar pick?
While the five-day dig turned up some non-mind-blowing artefacts – aluminium can pull tabs, broken bottle glass – the main point is to help map exactly where the Who, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin and Joe Cocker wowed the crowds 49 years ago.
‘‘The overall point of this investigation is to kind of define the stage space,’’ said Binghamton University Public Archaeology Facility project director Josh Anderson as he knelt beside a hole that showed evidence of a fence that kept 400,000 fans from the stage area.
‘‘We can use this as a reference point,’’ Anderson said. ‘‘People can stand on that and look up at the hill and say, ‘Oh, this is where the performers were. Jimi Hendrix stood here and played his guitar at 8.30 in the morning’.’’
Ageing baby boomers might blanch at the thought of archaeologists combing over the place that literally lent its name to their generation, as if it was a Civil War battle site.
But Max Yasgur’s old farm about 128km north of New York City is already on the National Register of Historic Places. And the hillside has been preserved since the late 1990s by a not-for-profit that runs an adjacent 1960s-themed museum (complete with a psychedelic bus).
‘‘This is a significant historic site in American culture, one of the few peaceful events that gets commemorated from the 1960s,’’ said Wade Lawrence, director of The Museum at Bethel Woods.
He said the archaeologists’ work would help the museum plan interpretive walking routes in time for the festival’s 50th anniversary next year.
Lawrence said aerial shots taken during the August weekend could not be relied upon to show the exact location of the stage and the lighting and speaker towers in 1969.
On-site data helps, though the bottom of the hillside was regraded in the late 1990s to accommodate a temporary stage for anniversary performances. The spot of the original stage is under a layer of compacted fill.
But archaeologists think they’ve found the spot where a chain link fence on the side of the stage area met the wooden ‘‘Peace Fence’’ that ran in front of the stage.
Now they can match concert photos to a specific spot in the field. That could help them estimate where the corners of the stage were 49 years ago. –AP