SRAC - Susquehanna River Archaeological Center

01/22/2026

It is with sadness that we inform you of the passing of a long time SRAC member and friend, Gloria Dick.

Gloria Dick passed away on Monday at age 95. Memorial service is January 31 at 2 PM at Haughey funeral home in Corning.

Here is a video of Gloria showing us the collection that she donated to SRAC years ago.

Long Time Member Gloria Dick donates a portion of her collection to SRAC that is relative to Owego, NY. A Susquehanna Broad and Brewerton point is within thi...

11/24/2025

Giving Tuesday is Tue, Dec 2, 2025, and I’d like to ask you to consider donating to an organization that is staffed 100% by volunteers and is doing some groundbreaking work for our region. SRAC is not just a great museum and a gift shop but it’s also a place where we have brought together some incredible staff that has literally rewritten our prehistoric past using Archaeology. From Spanish Hill and our latest work presented at the NYSAA conference in April that revealed that indeed there were earth and embankment walls around the top enclosing a ceremonial space to excavating Village sites along our river banks that date back to 1100 and 1300 A.D., I’m pretty proud of what we’ve been able to do so far and continue to do because of our community who support us.
 You can donate five dollars or you can donate whatever you can and know that 100% of whatever we receive is spent inside our walls and supporting scientific research right here in our small town.
Thanks for whatever you can do folks.

11/10/2025

Nonprofits helping nonprofits.

We received a call from Todd Carr from the French Azylum historic site in  Towanda, PA requesting ground penetrating radar (GPR) work to find a foundation for a building that once was a part of a small village built for the escape into the Pennsylvania wilderness for Marie Antoinette, and many of her French revolutionaries that helped us fight the British. (If you don’t know the story of French Azylum, it’s worth looking up folks!)

Today we got down there at 10 AM and started gridding out the area with transects every ten feet that we were to scan with our GPR.
The space was 100‘ x 50‘ and located on the river Flats of the Susquehanna River right near Standing Stone.

Once everything was set up, we let Tobias Quinn do his job of running the GPR through the grid and recording them in the computer.
We also marked anomalies that he found along the way and marked them on the ground.

The site was actually excavated in the 1970s and around 2000 but over the years it was again lost as to where it existed exactly. So the asylum staff mowed an area where they believed that it was approximately and it was up to us to be able to figure out with the GPR where the foundation actually resided.

Within four hours, we had run the grid and found the anomalies and then had our metal detector extraordinaire Larry Hurley check every anomaly for metal.
Incredibly, we first saw with our marking on the ground some alignments starting to come together to layout the whereabouts of the foundation. But with Larry’s metal detecting, it became very easy very fast. While Larry could’ve walked around that field for days picking up bottle tops, we had already marked the ground where anomalies existed and so he merely had to walk over to them and scan the 12 anomalies that we found.

Incredibly, two of those anomalies had been marked with iron stakes/markers by the prior excavation teams. (SRAC does this by the way at our excavation sites as well to make sure that our pits can be easily found in the future.) We of course had no idea that in 1970s or even 2000 either team would’ve done this until we found them.

As a result, we were able to locate the foundation and are providing all the information and mapping to French Azylum in order for them to create an exhibit for visitors to be able to experience firsthand the remnants of part of our Revolutionary War, and the people who once called this their home.

We want to thank the French Azylum board for reaching out to us and giving us the opportunity to be a part of their historic preservation efforts. Thanks for all you do!

Fun fact: SRAC IS STAFF 100% BY VOLUNTEERS!!

Following are pictures that we took today!

If you or your organization need any ground penetrating radar work done, please do not hesitate to reach out to us for assistance!

09/08/2025

Earlier this year, SRAC was lucky enough to get a good price on a ground penetrating radar (GPR) unit. Over the following months our team took time to learn about the unit and how to use it and just last month we actually performed our first GPR project for the historic Lowman cemetery that includes some of the earliest settlers in the area.

Sheryl and Elmer Robinson, who
are board members for the cemetery and long time SRAC members reached out to us and asked if we might be able to help them find some lost graves and markers in the earliest part of the cemetery.

SRAC’s GPR team met them at the cemetery initially and got a lay of the land and to understand what exactly was expected. Then our technical team went out and actually scanned the ground marking where the GPR was showing anomalies and actually marking all of that on a map grid.
It took our team four hours in total with a five man team to be able to accomplish just a 50 x 50 plot. But the results were amazing.

Today the Robinsons and SRAC got together and actually marked the ground to match the map and after putting in sticks, we could see that the GPR lined up exactly with where those graves should be so that they can replace the missing grave markers.

I want to thank the Robinsons for helping us by being our beta test site, which was very helpful to us and for them as well.

SRAC has already been contacted by another nonprofit to locate a foundation of a historic building in the near future, and we hope to be able to help other nonprofits and even provide services for profits and private individuals locate things under the ground without causing huge destruction by digging or even bulldozing in the future.

If you would like the SRAC GPR team to assist you or if you have questions please feel free to message us.

Following are pictures from the GPR PROJECT that we performed at the Lowman Cemetery.

06/30/2025

On behalf of SRAC - Susquehanna River Archaeological Center Deeanne Wymer and I got together today to create a new video that explains the most recent discoveries that have been found using new technologies concerning Spanish Hill. This is a more conversational approach explaining what Spanish Hill actually was used for in ancient times (a ceremonial space) and how we came to understand it’s importance and use after 20 years of investigation. Today it’s story no longer relies on so called misinformation, myths and legends, but instead on science.

I think that this video is so important for locals to see what an incredible place this area was in ancient times and why it is such a heartbreaking story that Spanish Hill was never preserved. I think you’ll also get a good feel for who SRAC is, what we do, and how passionate we are about our local Archaeology.

Note: Spanish Hills private property, and I’m asking that no one trespass. This video was purely to educate the people of this area and Pennsylvania and New York State Archaeology enthusiasts in the importance of this site in relation to the early beginnings of the Susquehannock people and our prehistoric past.

Let me know what you think!

Deb Twigg & DeeAnne Wymer re-record their presentation from the 2025 NYSAA Conference.

06/29/2025

What a great board meeting today at SRAC! We covered so many different things that are so important from getting a hard copy of the first report of our ground, penetrating radar effort to actually getting on the phone with the landowner to the next site that we’re very interested in that has Andaste Artifacts reported by collectors as early as the 1920s.! If all goes well, we’ll be opening up another excavation and possibly public field school in the fall!

But it doesn’t stop there ! Because our staff have finally finished an archaic pot that was excavated at the Ahbe Brennan otherwise known as the Polzella site in Athens, Pa and that pretty much finishes up our latest exhibit on this hugely significant location that was excavated in the 1930s and for three years by our organization as well. I want to again thank Lin and Maddie at the Tioga Point Museum for being a part of this effort. You’ll find that we included their museum in our exhibit at SRAC.

And yet there’s still more that we discussed and that is that Dee Wymer and I will be re-recording our Spanish Hill breakthrough that we presented for the New York State archaeological association tomorrow and in the end it will be available on YouTube and on the spanishhill.com site as well as the SRAC website and page so that all of the work that we’ve done over the past 20 years has now been validated and proven scientifically.

Lastly, we have decided that we will do the grand opening of the Ahbe Brennan site exhibit with a presentation as part of this year’s annual event, that we like to call “Drumbeats Through Time” and we have not held since 2020.

So many exciting things packed into one great board meeting with such incredible and talented board members.
Dr. Dee Wymer, Michael Sisto, Bob W Williams, Tobias Quinn, Tom Vallilee, Daniel Caister, Mark Madill, and Jessica Quinn, and that’s there holding the camera, Deb Twigg.
Stay tuned for more info!

05/19/2025

Recently SRAC purchased our first Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) system. Yesterday after time spent getting used to the system our team put it to use.
We have known of this site for quite some time along the Chemung River in Athens, Pa. The land owners invited me to see the plowed field abundant with charcoal several decades ago, but over the years the exact location was lost. Yesterday we went to that field, and we gridded out an area where we thought was most likely to turn up the site once more.
We placed flags every 5 meters and began the scan the grid we created. We then placed different flags where the GPR found anomalies. Our team then began to investigate the spots specifically marked.
Archaeology was found at each point with the most significant spot where we decided to concentrate revealing a fire pit or cooking platform, flint chips and charcoal, right where our system showed the anomaly to be.
This is significant.
First.
In a huge field we did not have to dig test pits everywhere with the hope of being lucky enough to land our shovel like finding a needle in a haystack. Instead we used the GPR, found the anomaly and simple dug a twelve inch test pit down to the archaeology below.
Second.
Archaeology is destructive by nature. The GPR gave us the ability to locate the site with minimal damage.
 SRAC is staffed 100% by volunteers and we have survived for 20 years now on purely donations and private grants. I am so grateful to be a part of this amazing organization that continues to plot along a path that is the cutting edge of Archaeology in our area.
I want to thank all of the volunteers and all of you who continue to support us in our efforts.
To learn more about our organization and how to volunteer or donate, please visit http://www.sracenter.org
Thanks everybody!
Stay tuned for more updates!

05/03/2025

Deb Twigg and Deeanne Wymer present at the NYSAA Conference.

05/02/2025

We’re here at the NYSAA conference in Niagara Falls to speak about new findings about Spanish Hill! Presentation tomorrow at 1:30pm!

03/20/2025

Please consider donating items to SRAC!

As many of you know, I also am a cofounder and the director for the nonprofit Susquehanna River Archaeological Center in Waverly, New York. As many of you are getting ready for your spring clean outs I would ask you to consider donating gently used clean and in working condition, antiques, collectibles, old, albums, jewelry, or anything else unique that you just may want to help one of your community organizations with by donating them. 100% of whatever we raise on the items that you donate goes directly to SRAC. There are no salaries as all of our staff are volunteers and so every bit of the money we raise goes right back into the operations and upkeep of the center itself.
We are also always looking for volunteer staff so if that’s of interest, please do contact me as well. Thanks for whatever you can do. I surely do appreciate it. Feel free to contact me with any questions you might have. PLEASE SHARE!

02/01/2025

The next chapter for SRAC has arrived! Ground penetrating radar is now yet another tool we have at our fingertips to assist our research efforts! Thank you to everyone who supports our organization and to all of our volunteers and amazing board! Onward!

01/26/2025

What a great SRAC board meeting today!
What a diverse group of talents we have around this table! Topics on the agenda included everything from our new Ground Penetrating Radar unit to paying off our mortgage and so much more!
Exciting times for our organization for sure!
Thank you to all of our board members and volunteers !
(Left to right)
Mark Madill
Deeanne Wymer
Bob Williams
Mike Sisto
David Moyer
Tobias Quinn
Tom Vallilee
Tim Ellis
Dan Caister
Jessica Quinn
Deb Twigg