Archaeologists really digging Woodstock
Archaeologists hope to pinpoint exact location of stage that hosted defining moment of Sixties America
Archaeologists are scouring the property where the Woodstock concert was held to piece together lost information about the epic moment in US history. Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the music festival and a team of experts has been enlisted to help map out precisely where the event’s performances unfolded. A five-day excavation found various artefacts which will help create an exact map of the site. It is hoped this will be used for interactive walking tours.
AMONG rolling fields and woodland 100 miles north of New York City, a team of archaeologists scours the land for clues.
Their search is not for Mayan mosaics or Roman ruins – rather, the team is looking for information about an epic moment in American history: the Woodstock music festival.
Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the festival, which brought Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin and Joe Cocker together for one of the defining musical events of the Sixties.
In preparation for the anniversary celebrations, a team from Binghamton University’s public archaeology facility has been enlisted to help map out precisely where the festival unfolded.
“The overall point of this investigation is to kind of define where the stage space was,” said Josh Anderson, the project director, kneeling beside a hole that showed evidence of a fence that kept 400,000 fans away from the stage area. “We can use this as a reference point,” he 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.’”
The five-day excavation did unearth some artefacts: parts of old aluminium can pull tabs, and bits of broken bottles. The artefacts will be analysed and mapped for depth and location – the pull tab parts are useful since they suggest where the surface level was at the time of the concert.
The main point of the survey was to gain a clear understanding of the layout of Max Yasgur’s old farm, which is already on the National Register of Historic Places.
The hillside has been preserved since the late Nineties by a charity that runs an adjacent Sixties-themed museum, complete with its own psychedelic bus.
“This is a significant historic site in American culture, one of the few peaceful events that gets commemorated from the Sixties,” said Wade Lawrence, director of The Museum at Bethel Woods.
He told the Associated Press that the archaeologists’ work would help the museum plan interpretive walking routes in time for the concert’s anniversary next year.
“Bethel Woods would like to recre- ate the experience of the main concert stage from the 1969 festival,” the museum’s website states.
“This includes the performers bridge over West Shore Road, the speaker towers, and fencing around the main stage in addition to footers or other evidence of the actual stage.”
Mr Lawrence said aerial shots taken during the August weekend could not be relied upon to show the exact location of the 1969 stage, and light and speaker towers.
On-site data helps, though the bottom of the hillside was re-graded in the late Nineties to accommodate a temporary stage for previous anniversary performances. The spot of the original stage is under a layer of compacted soil, brought in for the concerts.
However, archaeologists now think they have 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 photographs to a specific spot in the field, which could help them estimate where the stage corners were 49 years ago.
During the dig, archaeologists rolled back metre squares of the long green grass and carefully scraped away inches of dirt as they searched for clues about the long-ago layout.
“It’s some science. It’s some guesswork,” said Paul Brown, an archaeologist, as he worked a square. “You hope that you get lucky.”
Mr Lawrence said the archaeologists’ report also would be used as museum officials consider restoring the grades in the area of the original stage.
‘People can stand on that, look up at the hill and say “Hendrix stood here and played his guitar at 8:30am”’