Dig for artifacts delays new schools

Cradled in the dirt on property owned by Southwest Licking schools, Snyderpoint arrowheads from about 2,000 years ago were found by archaeologists.

Another tool found, one that probably was used for scraping, could date back about 10,000 years, when the first people inhabited America during the Paleoindian period.

There are more recent items, too. Horseshoes clumped with earth, a cobalt-blue Bromo-Seltzer medicine bottle and broken dish fragments made from redware, stoneware and pearlware. Nearly 300 items were collected where a farmhouse dating to the 1800s once stood by Route 40 and Smoke Road in Etna Township. There’s still more to collect at the site, which is south of Pataskala and west of Kirkersville.

“If you drive by, you would never know there was a house there,” said Andy Sewell, a senior historian and archaeologist with Columbus-based Lawhon & Associates Inc., an environmental consulting and engineering firm.

The items are all remnants of past lives.

The site will soon be home to the new Watkins Memorial High School. Just to the north side of the property, a building for fourth- and fifthgraders in the Southwest Licking district also will be built. The property borders the current high school and middle school complex.

But before construction can begin, a historical assessment must take place. That’s because the 180-acre site contains wetlands and requires a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers. Any items found that are older than 50 years require a review by archaeologists and a report submitted to the National Register of Historic Places via the Ohio Historic Preservation Office.