Profs & Pints Baltimore: Baltimore Before Baltimore

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Baltimore Before Baltimore,” an archaeological journey into the lives of the Indigenous people who called the Baltimore region home for thousands of years before Europeans arrived, with Katherine M.S. Ahlrichs, associate professor of anthropology and director of the Baltimore Community Archaeology Lab at Towson University.

[Doors open at 5. The talk starts at 6:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/digging-baltimore.]

Long before streets, rowhouses, and neighborhoods reshaped the landscape, Indigenous communities lived along the waterways and shores of what we now call Baltimore. Their history is often difficult to see in the modern landscape, but traces of their lives remain beneath our feet.

Join archaeologist Katherine Ahlrichs, who excavates throughout the region, for a journey through thousands of years of Baltimore’s Indigenous past.

Drawing on recent archaeological investigations at Herring Run Park in Baltimore City and North Point State Park in Baltimore County, Ahlrichs will explore what stone tools, pottery, food remains, and other archaeological evidence can tell us about the people who lived here long before European colonization.

You’ll learn how Indigenous communities used the region’s rivers, forests, and Chesapeake Bay shoreline. We’ll examine how their ways of life changed over thousands of years and how archaeologists piece together the stories of these past residents from evidence that can be remarkably subtle.

Along the way, Ahlrichs also will discuss what it means to practice archaeology in public parks and urban landscapes and how collaboration with Indigenous communities is changing the questions archaeologists ask and the stories archaeologists tell.

You’ll leave seeing familiar Baltimore landscapes differently—and with a much deeper sense of the human history beneath them. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: Students in the Summer Maryland Indigenous Archaeology Program troweling at a Chapman's Landing site. (Photo by Katherine Ahlrichs.)