SO MUCH FOR THE MYTH OF THE “TRACKLESS WILDERNESS”: Turns out people have been coming to the region we now call the Adirondacks practically since it was habitable. Paleo-Indian hunters camped on the tundralike shores of an inland sea, now Lake Champlain, and left their spearpoints some eleven thousand years ago. Between 3500 and 1300 B.C., other peoples (called Late Archaic) moved into the drainage areas of the mountains. The points of their projectiles, smaller and more compact than those of the Paleo-Indians, were designed to kill the elk, deer and bear that succeeded the mammoth, caribou and bison after their extinction, sometime around 8000 B.C. The Archaic peoples were followed by Woodland cultures that brought pottery and the bow and arrow into the forest. A story told from fragments of worked stone and clay, the prehistory of the Adirondacks is little thought of and little known. The presence of Native Americans in the region in relatively recent times is also an untold tale, shrouded in silence and misinformation. Amid the ignorance and uncertainties, however, one absolute fact does emerge: native peoples have been coming into the Adirondacks in a continuum that stretches from thousands of years ago to the present day.
