Woodpecker Cave Site:
Visiting a Prehistoric Rock Shelter

Woodpecker Cave is an archaeological site in Johnson county. People lived at this location off and on for thousands of years. A "rockshelter" is not an actual cave. Many prehistoric groups of people would live in them, at least during parts of the year. Even when it is very cold in the winter, Woodpecker Cave is out of the wind and faces the winter sun. It often feels very comfortable here even on cold winter days.

Other rockshelters in this area have been excavated by archaeologists. There is one called Minott’s Rock Shelter in Linn County and also some in Jones and Jackson Counties that have been studied.

Woodpecker Cave was found when archaeologists were looking for sites that might be flooded when the Coralville Reservoir was filled up in the late 1950s.

The size of the area the prehistoric people might have lived on was about 50 feet long and averaged 7 feet wide.

What did the archaeologists find at Woodpecker Cave?
	---They found two different layers (or strata). ---They found 463 pieces of pottery and believe that they were parts of 55 different pots. ---They found 40 stone tools of various kinds: spear points (arrowheads), stone knives, stone scrapers, a grooved axe, and a chopper. ---They found bone and antlers that had been made into tools. ---One of the layers that had no identifiable tools, but still had burned bones, charcoal, shell, and fire-cracked rocks that indicate the past presence of people living there.

The kind of pottery that was found is similar to pottery that is found at Effigy Mound sites in Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota. That makes archaeologists think the site is over 1000-1500 years old, just like the Effigy Mounds. The second layer had pottery that was even older, perhaps 2000 years old. Because there was a thick layer of material excavated, archaeologists think that Woodpecker may have been occupied for a relatively long time. The big pile of soil in front of the rockshelter (it has trees growing on it) is the soil that archaeologists dug out from the shelter. It would not have been there when the prehistoric Indians lived there. All the artifacts found by archaeologists are now in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.

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