Girard Richmond; Tumanaranaming #2

Site Page

Girard Richmond

The Tumanaranaming #2 Site was discovered in 2010, during testing in advance of the widening of I-95, and was more intensively excavated in 2012. The site was located at the northeast corner of the intersection of East Girard Avenue and Richmond Street, in the far southern part of the Port Richmond neighborhood. Archaeological excavations resulted in the discovery of 850 pre-contact artifacts and a single well-preserved hearth feature.

The site was originally established on a terrace landform overlooking the margins of a nearby stream called Tumanaranaming (“the Wolf’s Walk”) by members of the Lenape tribe, and known during historic times as Gunner’s Run. A steep slope that dropped off into the wetter soils of the floodplain marked the southern boundary of the site. Though this vicinity was later developed and a series of small row homes fronted Richmond Street by the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the portion of the Tumanaranaming #2 Site that survived further disturbance was preserved in the open backyard spaces behind those houses.

Pre-contact artifacts recovered from the site represent a dispersed, low-density scatter spread across the original terrace landform fragment, contained in plowzone (Ap) and underlying subsoil deposits. The artifact collection is predominantly made up of fire-cracked rock (FCR) and argillite, chert, jasper, quartz, and quartzite tool-manufacturing debris. Five stone tools were also recovered and include both unifacially and bifacially worked pieces, a chert side-notched projectile point, and an argillite point. A handful of badly weathered pre-contact pottery sherds and a single clay pipe stem were also found.

The most interesting discovery at the site was a well-preserved cooking hearth feature, measuring approximately 4 feet in diameter and extending more than half a foot below the base of the plowzone. The hearth contained more than 300 pieces of FCR and narrowly missed being destroyed during the construction of an adjacent nineteenth-century outbuilding. Charcoal fragments preserved in the feature matrix were submitted for carbon-14 analysis and returned a calibrated date range of A.D. 1025–1168 (calibrated median date=A.D. 1098).

Carbon-14 dating and the diagnostic artifacts recovered suggest that Native American peoples occupied the Tumanaranaming #2 Site during the beginning of the Late Woodland culture period. During this time, the site seems to have functioned primarily as a resource-procurement locale, where small groups of people would periodically visit to hunt, fish, collect important plant foods, and manufacture and rejuvenate stone tools. Overall, the Tumanaranaming #2 Site is similar in its environmental setting, range of artifacts represented, and date range to the nearby Hope Farm/Richmond Hall Site. It is possible that both sites were originally part of a single expanse of overlapping pre-contact occupations that stretched for some distance along the banks of the Delaware River.

The historic component (Girard Richmond) consisted of the foundations to three historic structures (2234, 2236/2238, and 2240 Richmond Street) and three privy features. None of these privies contained an intact primary horizon; they were most likely utilized as general waste and furnace disposal beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth century. The historic component does not appear to share the significance of the Early Woodland component.