ROCK HISTORY
Archaeologists dig Woodstock
Ready to feel old? Archaeologists have completed a five-day excavation at Woodstock — yes, where the 49-yearold music festival took place — in an effort to locate the exact spot where Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Janis Joplin and other rock legends jammed out.
“The overall point of this investigation is to kind of define the stage space,” explained project director Josh Anderson, of Binghamton University.
The school’s Public Archaeology Facility conducted the Woodstock dig with help from the Museum at Bethel Woods and Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, both llocated on Max Yasgur’s old upsstate Bethel dairy farm, where the “three days of peace and music” took place Aug. 15-18, 1969.
Every year, hundreds of people — locals call them “pilgrims” — visit from around the world to try and recapture the festival spirit.
They walk the same hallowed ground as Creedence Clearwater Revival, Joe Cocker and Sly and the Family Stone, but finding the stage is another story.
Aerial shots taken during the festival have helped researchers pinpoint places they think the stage could be, but experts can’t say for sure. That’s where Anderson and his team come in.
“It’s some science. It’s some guesswork,” archaeologist Paul Brown told The Associated Press. “You hope that you get lucky.”
With Woodstock’s 50-year anniversary approaching next sum- mer, researchers had hoped to find some sort of memento or remnants of the roughly 400,000 revelers that made it to the 800acre farm. A guitar pick, a headband, something.
Their haul, instead, yielded a few beer-can tabs and shards of glass. But the team didn’t give up.
Archaeologists kept digging and eventually found what is believed to be the exact location of the wooden “Peace Fence” in front of the stage and matched that with aerial photos to map the stage’s four corners.
“We can use this as a reference point,” Anderson said of the fence. “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.’ ”