Amateur archeology buff donates tools, findings to SRU
The past is truly past for Edmund Dlutowski of Butler.
Earlier this month, the 82-year-old former senior electronic designer for Armco turned his collection of arrowheads, clay pipes and other artifacts to Slippery Rock University.
The artifacts, gathered during a 60-year career of amateur archaeology, went to the lab that bears his name in the Spotts World Culture Building.
He said there are still a lot of finds to be made in Butler County, but they won't be made by him.
“I have problems walking,” he said. “When I get down on my knees, I have a hell of a time getting back up.”
It's not the first time Dlutowski donated his belongings to the university. In 2014, he donated his library, excavation tools and much of his artifact collection to SRU, its Archaeology Club and the Old Stone House, a historic site operated by the university.“I've been doing it for a long time, over 60 years,” Dlutowski said of his excavation work.“I got an interest from a high school teacher, Marietta Dietrick, whose father had a farm in Butler County,” he said of his time at Etna High School. “She would bring in arrowheads after they plowed the fields.”After catching the bug, Dlutowski went digging himself and got some books to study on his own in what he called a hands-on archaeology education.“I eventually found the Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology and attended meetings when I could,” he said. “I also volunteered for some digs that Carnegie Museum was running.”
Dlutowski said his digs were mostly in Western Pennsylvania, including one in Butler “down the hill from the hospital” that was the site of two separate Native American villages, one dating to 1390, the other put at 1690.“It was a large, flat area. Kids used to pay ball down there,” he said. “After a rain, they would drag an angle iron behind a vehicle to smooth it out, and they would find artifacts.”Dlutowski found habitation patterns — how the villages were set up — and pottery, projectile points and food remains.It all was a clue pointing to how the inhabitants lived. Any bit of knowledge was welcome because historians didn't even know what to call the people living at the site, designated 36BT43 — 36 was the numeral for Butler County, BT designated Butler and 43 meant it was the 43rd archaeological site in the county.Dlutowski said, “We call them the Monongahela Culture. The problem is, we don't know what they called themselves because they didn't leave any written records.“Everything we know about them, we found in the ground,” he said.He said the site was completely excavated of artifacts, and a warehouse was built on the site.
One artifact comes from a people Dlutowski knows the name of: clay pipes, found wherever colonial soldiers, sailors and tavern guests gathered.“They're all over the place,” he said. “Wherever there was a tavern, you find clay pipes.”In colonial times, the pipes were shared among smokers. They would be placed on the mantels of taverns.A guest would take down a pipe, fill it with tobacco, smoke it, then place the pipe back on the mantel, first breaking off the end of the stem so the next smoker would have a clean mouthpiece.The pipes, and the rest of Dlutowski's collection, will be kept in the Edmund Dlutowski Laboratory for Archaeological Science and be curated by Aksel Casson, assistant professor of nonprofit management, empowerment and diversity studies, who teaches anthropology and archaeology courses at SRU.“I've worked with him for a long time,” said Casson of Dlutowski. “He brought me into his little circle about 10 years ago.”
Casson said he's worked with Dlutowski on his excavation at the Old Stone House in Brady Township.“We are going to benefit from this collection,” said Casson.What students make of the collection is up to them, according to Casson.Some may work at classifying the hundreds of artifacts, said Casson, while others may take a single object and, working with the history department, tell a story about the artifact.“There is no end to the possibilities,” Casson said.Dlutowski has no regrets about passing his collection on to SRU students.“I'm old,” he said. “There is no sense in keeping anything, because I won't last that long. Somebody might make use of it.”He added, “You look at things different when you are an archeologist. We are the sum total of everything that passed before us.”
