CANTON, Ky. (AP) _ Hundreds of artifacts, some dating back almost 8,000 years, have been discovered at the construction site of the new Lake Barkley bridge in Canton.

Members of the University of Kentucky Program for Archaeological Research have been excavating the site for six months. They said some of the artifacts, most of which are stone tools, are associated with early Native Americans who lived in the area between 8,000 and 6,000 B.C.

Project archaeologist Michael Loughlin said they have found an unusually high volume of items from the site, especially because people were largely nomadic during that time.

”The diversity of tools we’ve found suggest that what we’re dealing with is not just something like a hunting camp, but a larger-scale occupation that was intermittently used over a period of several centuries,’ Loughlin said.

He said the artifacts recovered will provide information about how people lived during that time and what they did.

”We have an opportunity to add to what has been a fairly limited understanding of these groups,’ Louglin said.

The Paducah Sun reports (http://bit.ly/1Io5dIz ) members are expected to finish their search Friday, after which all the artifacts will be taken to Lexington to be washed, catalogued and analyzed Louglin said.

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