The Tumanaranaming #1 Site was initially identified in 2011 and investigated more intensively throughout 2012; the site was located beneath portions of Richmond Street at the intersection with Beach Street.
| Site Name | Tumanaranaming #1 |
| PASS# | 36PH0037 |
| Image | 1 image site overview |
| Dates of Excavation | 2011-2012 |
| Phase of Excavation | Phase I, II and III |
| Number of Test Units | 28 |
| Approximate Number of Features Identified | 6 |
| Associated Periods | Pre-contact; Middle to Late Woodland period |
| Site Acreage | Approximately 0.2 acres |
Excavations beneath the existing street surface were performed initially in order to examine a planned new sewer alignment and rain garden feature, and also to determine whether or not any remnants of the former Dyottville Glass Works industrial complex was preserved at this location. The Tumanaranaming #1 Site was identified at depths of between 6 and 12 feet below the present street grade, and beneath structural features associated with Dyottville.
Excavations revealed the site to have been originally situated along the northern banks of a small meandering stream the Lenape Indians called Tumanaranaming (“the Wolf’s Walk”), very near its confluence with the Delaware River (Lënapei Sipu). Artifacts within the site were distributed across two distinct and completely intact landforms: an intact upper Middle Holocene–age terrace and a lower, water-logged Late Holocene floodplain setting. Soils in the floodplain portion of the site consisted of a series of three stacked ground surfaces, each of which contained undisturbed artifacts. The stacked nature of soils and artifact deposits in this part of the site makes Tumanaranaming #1 the only stratified pre-contact site thus far identified in Philadelphia.
Archaeological documentation of the Tumanaranaming #1 Site resulted in the recovery of more than 5,000 artifacts and six intact pre-contact cultural features. The artifact assemblage is dominated by tool-manufacturing debris and fire-cracked rock (FCR), but also includes numerous unifacial and bifacial tools, groundstone tools (chopper, net sinkers, hammerstones), several dozen pottery fragments (Mockley and Riggins variants), two clay pipe fragments, and two possible glass trade beads. Temporally diagnostic point forms include side-notched, stemmed, teardrop, and triangular forms that show edgewear suggesting their primary usage as knives. Manufacturing debris from the site suggests that locally available stream cobbles were the primary source of lithic raw material, with jasper, chert, quartz, and quartzite comprising the most common lithic types found. Several of the pottery fragments were submitted for phytolith and residue analysis, with results suggesting that at least two of the pots had been used for processing grass seeds.
Pre-contact features were documented both on the floodplain and on the terrace portions of the site. Three of the five terrace features were semi-circular post features. Unfortunately, given the limited space available for excavation, no pattern of posts could be discerned, and it was not possible to determine if the posts could have been associated with some sort of structure or shelter. The lone floodplain feature was a large hearth or earth oven. A total of six carbon-14 samples were collected from both floodplain and terrace soil contexts, returning calibrated median dates ranging from A.D. 883–1521.