SALEM COUNTY, NJ (KYW Newsradio) — In Pilesgrove, New Jersey, just east of the Delaware River, sits 75 acres of land called Whispering Woods — an area rich with Native American history.
About 10 years ago, the owner of the land was required to do an archaeological survey. Rutgers Camden students were able to get involved and found lots of interesting material.
“There was actually some pretty, you know, significant technology on the people that were living on the land long before, you know, colonization,” said Kimberlee Moran, who specializes in forensic archaeology at Rutgers Camden.
They have about 2,000 artifacts in total that came out of the 75 acres.
Among things like arrowheads and pottery, they also found lots of firecracker rocks, which they say are the remains of cooking practices.
“So rocks would be put into the fire, they would heat the rocks up, and then the hot rock would go into a vessel of cold water to basically raise the temperature of that water for cooking.”
She says findings like these support the fact there were many people who were here and using this land pre-contact, specifically, the Lenni Lenape.
Explorations continued a few years later. About half of the collected material is housed at Rutgers Camden for educational purposes, and the other half, in partnership, is at Rowan University.