Rockshelters along streams provided handy protection and shelter for Indians for many centuries. Representing at least 3,000 years of periodic small-scale occupation, the Paine Run Rockshelter archaeological site in Augusta County provides local evidence of stylistic and technological evolution in prehistoric stone projectile points and ceramics preserved there. It and the other prehistoric sites identified by a University of Virginia archaeologist in a 1976 survey of this area of the Shenandoah National Park demonstrate that the region was most heavily populated during the Late Archaic-Early Woodland periods but was little used in Late Woodland times. The Paine Run Rockshelter site thus helps document that a major change in lifestyle occurred in the Blue Ridge before the coming of the Europeans.