RESEARCHES AND TRANSACTIONS OF THE NEW YORK STATE 
ARCHEOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

LEWIS H. MORGAN CHAPTER
ROCHESTER, N.Y.

An Early Site In Cayuga County, New York
Type Component of the Frontenac Focus, Archaic Pattern

By  William A. Ritchie, Archeologist, Rochester Museum of Arts and Sciences

Published by Lewis H. Morgan Chapter, Rochester, N.Y.


An Early Site in Cayuga County, New York;
Type Component of the Frontenac Focus,
Archaic Pattern

By WILLIAM A. RITCHIE, Archeologist

Rochester Museum of Arts and Sciences

Preface

SINCE 1925, when the Rochester Museum of Arts and Sciences began excavations on the 
large village site situated near the foot of Lamoka Lake in Schuyler County, New York, 1 
evidence has gradually been accumulating in support of an early and probably lengthy 
period of occupation of the New York area by at least two discrete ethnic and cultural 
groups possessing a common economic background of hunting, fishing, and gathering, 
and lacking such advanced traits as the practice of horticulture, the ceramic art, and the use 
of the smoking pipe. The exploration by the museum of two extensive village sites at 
Brewerton, at the foot of Oneida Lake in central New York, in 1938 and 1939, afforded a 
reasonably clear insight into the second of these Archaic manifestations, and suggested a 
partial contact with mutual exchange of certain traits between the Lamoka and Brewerton 
cultures. In. 1939 and 1940, the investigations on Frontenac Island in Cayuga Lake, herein 
to be described, provided Dew and significant data for the elucidation of these problems of 
chronology, and cultural and physical typology relating to the Archaic period of human 
habitation of the state. The wealth of industrial objects and the abundant skeletal remains of 
their authors, found on Frontenac Island, disclose, if we have correctly interpreted our data 
, a composite manifestation of the previously discovered Lamoka a and Brewerton cultures 
and peoples, in which the process of social interaction has engendered a third, hitherto 
unknown Archaic complex the Frontenac Focus. Moreover, although definite physical 
stratigraphy was wanting, the new site, in yielding a largely different complex from the 
upper level of the general refuse mantle, confirmed evidence already on record from the 
Lamoka station 3 and the Vinette site at Brewerton 4 respecting the priority of the Archaic 
occupations in New York.

The reader of this report will recognize in its conciseness and in the absence of detailed 
descriptions of features and artifacts, a marked departure from the writer's customary 
technique. This is neither the result of a cursory study of the extremely significant 
Frontenac material nor the product of choice, but is occasioned by the scarcities of materials 
and labor, advanced cost of publication, and other exigencies of war time. Under pressure 
of such necessity, therefore, the writer has attempted to convey a comprehensive account of 
his researches, relying in rather large part on
----------------
1 Ritchie, 1932; 1936
2 Ritchie, 1940
3 Ritchie, 1944, p. 303
4 Ibid., pp. 160-166

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the condensed summaries, tables, and photographs, for the presentation of all essential 
data. As usual, photographs are by the writer, unless otherwise indicated.

Introduction

Seven miles from the foot of Cayuga Lake and about one-half mile off the east shore, near 
the town of Union Springs, Cayuga County, is to be found the only island in the Finger 
Lakes of New York state.  This tiny islet was named in honor of Louis de Buade, Comte 
de Frontenac, Governor-General of New France in 1672-82 and again in 1689-98, who, 
however, never contemplated this territory, in his day in the possession of the Cayuga 
Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy, although in 1696 he led a military expedition against 
the neighboring Onondagas and Oneidas.  We are indebted to the Jesuit, Peter Raffeix, 
long a missionary to the Cayugas, for the following description of the setting of our site, 
doubtless as valid some thousand years before, when we presume Frontenac Island to have 
been occupied, as in 1670, when the Reverend Father set it down for his superior at 
Quebec.

"Cayuga is the finest country I have ever seen in America; it is situated in latitude 42 1/2¡, 
the needle dips there scarcely more than ten degrees.  It lies between two lakes, and is no 
more than four leagues wide, almost continuous plains, and the timber on their borders is 
very fine....  More than a thousand deer are annually killed in the neighborhood of Cayuga. 
Fishing, as well the salmon as the eel and other fisheries, is as abundant as at Onondaga. 
Four leagues distance from here, on the brink of a river, I saw within a small compass, 
eight or ten very fine Salt springs. It is there that numbers of nets are spread to catch 
[passenger] pigeons; seven to eight hundred are often caught in one haul of a net. Lake 
Tiohero [Cayuga], which adjoins our village, is fourteen leagues long by one or two wide, 
it abounds with swans and geese all winter and in spring nothing is seen but continual 
clouds of all sorts of game.  The river Choueguen (Oswego) [Seneca], which rises in this 
lake, soon branches into several canals, surrounded by prairies, with occasionally very fine 
and pretty deep bays, where wild fowl flock.Ó 1

Frontenac Island owes its origin to two factors, namely, the resistant nature of the 
limestone mass composing it, arising from its character as a local coral reef (Stromatopora 
concentrica) in the fossiliferous Cobleskill limestone, of Upper Silurian age; combined with 
a local syncline between it and the nearest shore (Howland, now Pratt's, Point, one-fifth of 
a mile to the northeast, see Plate 1), from which glacial erosion has removed the weaker 
Rondout waterlime.2

The surface of the island, comprising some 37,782 square feet, or a little less than an acre, 
is today uniformly level, sloping very gradually from a near-central artificial escarpment 
down to water-level all around. The

1 Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, Vol. III, E. B. 
O'Callaghan, ed., Albany, 1853, p. 251, footnote 3.

2 From the section, "The Finger Lakes Region," by 0. D. von Engeln, in "The Paleozoic 
Stratigraphy of New York," (D. H. Newland, ed.), XVI International Geological 
Congress, Guidebook 4, Washington, 1932, p. 65.

We are indebted to Dr. Harold L. Ailing, Professor of Geology, University of Rochester, 
for aid with the geological considerations of the site.

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entire central portion has a present elevation of 8-8.5 feet above the lake level (Plate 2) and 
lies about 380 feet above the sea.  The island's periphery is fringed with a rubble beach at 
the foot of a low rugged escarpment composed of large irregular blocks of erosion-
detached bedrock, partly overgrown with bushes and small trees, in which is interspersed 
an occasional large elm, ash, or basswood.  Close to the center rises a solitary tamarack, 
whose roots reached out to invade burial 3 (see map in rear cover and Plate 2).

Capping the bedrock in places are portions of the original subsoil, a light brown clay 
bearing numerous small pebbles suggesting deposition from a stream flowing from the 
mainland while what is now the island still lay submerged during early Postglacial times. 
At the south end of the island, where the subsoil is thickest, its depth rarely exceeds 6 
inches, while from the higher north end it has been entirely washed away. Everywhere it 
was found to be sterile of industrial remains (see Figure 1).  At various places, especially in 
the western half of the island, remnants of an old sod- or duffline, 1-2.75 inches thick, 
shown also in Figure 1, invested the subsoil, appearing as a very black, granular, friable 
soil. Artifacts of the same types as found in the lower portion of the refuse covering 
occurred sporadically in this layer, as though trampled into it.  The large corner-notched 
knife, illustrated as fig. 63 of Plate 7, came from the very base of this sod-line. South of 
the escarpment a mantle of black midden material, the typical debris of human habitation, 
overspread the island, ranging in thickness from approximately 10 inches at the extreme 
northern portion, where it directly overlay the bedrock, to more than 29 inches at the 
southern end, where it capped the deepest portion of the subsoil (see Figure 1).  This 
refuse layer or general midden was implementiferous throughout, with notable quantitative 
and qualitative variations, and in its lower zone it bore the burials and most of the other 
features presently to be described.

History and Acknowledgments

Since the middle of the last century, at least, there has been local knowledge of the 
archaeological remains on Frontenac Island, gained perhaps through the quarrying 
operations conducted on its northeastern portion by the Auburn Branch of the New York 
Central Railroad, for the purpose of obtaining stone to reinforce the low lake shore along 
its right-of-way at Union Springs.  In 1856, after approximately one-third of the original 
surface had been blasted and hauled away, creating the 7-foot escarpment previously 
referred to, the protests of Mr. W. W. Adams, a local collector of Indian relics, impelled 
the State of New York to restrain the railroad from further despoliation and the island was 
then ceded to the Town of Union Springs, which has ever since exercised over it a vigilant 
guardianship.

Save for minor sporadic digging by Mr. Adams and rare clandestine pitting by relic-
seekers, there was no further disturbance of the site until July, 1925, when Mr. Donald A. 
Cadzow, working under the auspices of the Museum of the American Indian, Heye 
Foundation, opened a small trench and a number of test-holes just south of the center of the 
island (in the unexcavated area south of the tamarack tree on our map).

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