The Trenton Skulls

By 1859 it had become established that humans had a more ancient history than had previously been known, but just how old was Homo sapiens? This was a pivotal question, for the area of the world that could claim the oldest vestiges of humanity could provide crucial clues about the evolution and dispersal of our species. Asia, with its open plains and "vigorous climate", seemed like the best place to look for the stock from which humans arose but traces of prehistoric humans appeared in many other places around the world.

Trenton, New Jersey was one such place. Not far from the Delaware River and the Pennsylvania state line the state capitol is not the first place that springs to mind when I think of paleoanthropology, yet in the latter half of the 19th century controversy brewed over human remains found there. Like their counterparts in other northeastern states many New Jersey citizens were fascinated by the Native American artifacts common to the state. Stone tools, burnt wood, shell middens; everywhere there seemed to be the remnants of the Lenape who had so recently occupied the same land. It was not until about 1870 that these sites attracted more detailed study, however, which was led by Charles Abbott.

Abbott found many Lenape tools and artifacts but some of the sites yielded unexpected surprises. Further down in the soil, close to a layer of gravel laid down when glaciers extended into New Jersey, were "rude" stone implements of a different type. These tools raised considerable interest for, as John Thomas Short wrote in The North Americans of Antiquity in 1880, if Abbott was right then "the gravel, boulders, and rude implements associated with them were deposited by ice-rafts on the descent of a glacier down the valley, and that man more rude and ancient than the red Indian dwelt at the foot of the glacier, being driven south by its advance and following it again to the north upon its return." According to what was known of geology at the time these could very well be remnants of humans that had arrived during the Pliocene when New Jersey enjoyed a more equitable climate just before the advance of the Ice Age.

Abbott continued his research through the 1880's and 1890's and was joined by other archaeologists like Ernest Volk, the assistant of F.W. Putnam from the Peabody Museum at Yale. They were not always fortunate in their searches in the field but through their connections to farmers and railway workers they were able to quickly obtain bones and other archaeological curiosities that came out of the ground. Indeed, much of the skeletal material was found accidentally, and one skull was even found accidentally in an unoccupied plot of the Riverview Cemetery.

What relationship did these "pre-Lenape" people have to other humans? Were they the precursors of the Lenape or another sort of ancient race that was entirely unknown? One hypothesis, based on the stone tools, was that they were early Inuit (called Esquimaux at the time) who had once occupied the Delaware Valley. Given that these could have been among the oldest human remains found in North America, however, there was little to compare them with to know for sure.

By the late 1890's there was now a substantial collection of "glacial man" remains and the claims about their origin attracted the attention of the Czech-born physical anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka. He was one of the leading anthropologists in the United States during a time when most authorities were still in England, France, and Germany and as such his opinion on the matter would carry great weight. In 1898 he arranged to visit the New Jersey sites and examine the several skulls that had been recovered from the glacial level for himself.

What Hrdlicka found was not surprising. The majority of the skulls closely resembled verified Lenape skulls already housed in collections. This seemed reasonable enough for recent but deep burials could confound archaeologists and some of the bones may have even sunk after their inhumation. There were two skulls, however, that perplexed Hrdlicka. They were found in Burlington County and in Riverview Cemetery, respectively, and they were starkly different from those of any group of northeastern Native Americans. The back of each cranium was wide, the faces were narrow, and the forehead was low, giving them a seemingly ancient appearance. What sort of person had they once belonged to? Could they represent captives brought by the Lenape to the east? Or did they truly belong to an earlier, distinct race during glacial times? Hrdlicka could not say. It was a problem for the geologists to solve and would depend on further discoveries of similar skulls.

Hrdlicka published his initial study in 1902 but the questions to the affinity of the "Riverview" and "Burlington" skulls remained. He continued to search the literature for any other skull type that resembled those two and in his 1907 report on supposed "early man" remains from North America he reported that he had found them in the reports of the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow. The skulls closely matched a "low" type from people known to inhabit northwestern Germany to the coast of Holland starting in about the 9th century. This could be no coincidence; "That such marked similarity of any two normal, important, extreme, and repeated forms in cranial morphology could be of accidental origin has never been demonstrated, and, in fact, is not conceivable." But how to explain a European type skull among those of Lenape across the Atlantic?

There seemed to be two possibilities. One was that humans with this European type of skull had first appeared in North America and traveled at some ancient time, perhaps by accident, to Europe. There was no further evidence to show that this was true, though, and it seemed more likely to Hrdlicka that people from Holland settled in New Jersey in recent times and were buried there. This latter view became the most widely accepted and it seemed that the mystery of the Trenton skulls had been solved.

Hrdlicka's report did not deter some archaeologists, however. G.F. Wright was convinced that the area around Trenton truly was the home of an ice-age people even if their relationship to other Native Americans was difficult to determine. Even as late as 1920 he reaffirmed the veracity of the "glacial Trentonite" hypothesis and stated that the controversy had been laid to rest as to whether there were ice-age humans in New Jersey. The evidence was always tenuous but archaeologists continued to search for better evidence of this "pre-Lenape" culture well into the 20th century.

Eventually the search for humans that lived in New Jersey during the time of the last ice age fizzled out. Every bit of evidence, from bones to tools, were too readily explained by being indicative of the Lenape. Like many of the other human remains of "high antiquity" that stirred controversy at the turn of the 20th century (the Natchez pelvis, CaClaveras skull, Lansing skeleton, etc.) the Trenton skulls and similar materials were stripped of the significance so many true to imbue them with.

Yet this does not mean that Hrdlicka's analysis is beyond reproach. He was right that the bones were not the remains of glacial humans but he may have been wrong as to the provenance of the Burlington and Riverview skulls. It is possible that the "anomalous" skulls came from recent burials of Europeans (one was, after all, found in a graveyard) Hrdlicka made far too much out of relatively small differences. He was carrying out research during a time when physical anthropology (and other sciences dealing with bones, like paleontology) was marked by a kind of typology where plasticity and variation were often overlooked. Relatively minor differences were not attributed to variation or differences in growth but could be used to make sharper delineations about population or race that were not well-supported. The hypothesis that was ignored during the entire controversy was that the two skulls could simply be those of Lenape that, for one reason or another, varied from others found in the area. Since both were found by accident it is not known how they were situated in the ground. There is no detailed archaeological analysis to look to for clues that might answer these questions.

It should be noted, however, that New Jersey does possess Pleistocene deposits. They are often scanty and don't form a continuous series across the state but there are places like Big Brook Park where bits of Pleistocene mammals are sometimes found. There are even some Pleistocene strata on the continental shelf around the area of Island Beach State Park; every now and then someone find a mastodon tooth or other scrap that has been washed up. To the best of my knowledge, however, there has been no conclusive evidence that there were humans living among the mastodons and caribou that once inhabited the state.