Ten minutes from Goshen to Ice Age site at Dutchess Quarry

GOSHEN —If you lived in Goshen or the mid-Hudson Valley around 12,500 years ago, you might have found rather large elephants, moose, a now-extinct form of lion or huge pigs (peckery) in your backyard. A recent free lecture of the Goshen Bicentennial Committee brought this real story to an audience that almost filled the Village Hall meeting room. During this Ice Age, you would have been part of the population of the first humans, Ice Age hunters during the Paleo Indian period, to occupy America. Just a little more than 40 years ago, remains of the animals were just some of the artifacts recovered from the newly discovered Dutchess Quarry Caves located off Route 17A on the way to Florida from Goshen. Carbon dating from man-made points found with elk bones made it possible to determine the actual time that people lived there. Thanks to the Orange County chapter of the New York State Archaeological Society, the audience heard Professor Barry Kass and his experiences at the caves and expertise on the subject. He is a professor emeritus of anthropology and archaeology at SUNY Orange, was involved in field investigations at the Dutchess Quarry Caves in the 1980s and has also been a U.S. National Park ranger-archaeologist at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. Experts believe that the Dutchess Quarry area was probably a hunting look-out station for mastodon and caribou for the Ice Age hunters to feed their families. The nationally known site is important to archaeologists and some may get to visit it. Since the Archaeological Society is able to get permission to visit the caves, many in the audience signed up to tour the site in the future.