McFate Archaeological Site
Cochranton, Crawford County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
The excavation of three overlapping palisaded villages on this site has provided data about settlement patterns of the French Creek Valley. Artifacts left by the peoples living here from 1100 AD to 1500 AD indicate a subsistence based on seasonal hunting, gathering, and light farming. Shell-tempered pottery with a distinctive design known as McFate Incised has helped identify tribal movement across the landscape and potential trade routes.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Long before European settlers reached northwestern Pennsylvania, Native peoples built successive palisaded villages along the French Creek Valley, occupying this ground from roughly 1100 to 1500 AD. Excavations here uncovered evidence of a life balanced across the seasons—hunting, gathering, and small-scale farming—along with a distinctive shell-tempered pottery style archaeologists named McFate Incised. That signature pottery has since helped researchers trace the movements and trade connections of the region's Indigenous communities.
Why it matters
The site preserves centuries of Indigenous life in the Pennsylvania interior and gives archaeologists a rare thread for tracking how Native communities moved, traded, and connected across the pre-contact landscape.
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