Seeing your images made me think of this quartz item, which I picked up, among others, after an area at the top of a local hill was bulldozed. I don't go out looking for artifacts, but was searching over the newly-cleared area for quartz with crystals in it, which I've found elsewhere on this hill. This stone has a small crystal on the left side toward the bottom where there's a gap. I was struck with how much your stone and this one look alike.
Other things I've found since the bulldozing are shown here, with a regular teaspoon for scale. The stone on top seem as if it could be a hand-held blade. If you hold it in your right hand with your index finger over the top, it feels just right, and the bottom edge is like a cutting edge. The piece on the left reminds me of an axe blade, and the one on the right is like a manitou stone. It is of a different kind of stone from the other pieces, but has a worn look and feel. The blade in the first picture is shown here with its other side up.
Another view of the same pieces, the first piece now turned back over.Are these really crafted pieces? I don't know. I do know that there are conflicting stories about whether or not there was an Indian burial ground on this hill. A Lenape town was known to be just a quarter to a half mile below. There is a lot of white quartz here, sometimes including crystals, and the wood with many springs and the quartz piles I've mentioned before is just below. Could these have been ceremonial or burial pieces? I'll probably never know.
5 comments :
Geophile: your example is a lot like mine and, in my opinion, even more clearly a stone tool.
Also I should mention something about your "Manitou" shaped stone: during the middle archaic, the stemmed arrowhead was a standard hafting design and they also made larger tools hafted in the same way. A lot of Mavor and Dix's manitou stones look, to me, like they are actually old quarrying tools. So I make the same suggestion for yours - this is a standard hafted tool from the middle archaic.
Hey, this is coferrells from GA. I have a lot of quartz tools that look like these you have posted. The one is either an axe or hoe. I have several of those. Every time it rains i have quartz points / tools "pop-up" in the pasture. The quartz ones tend to be rougher than ones from flint. I have a lot of scrapers I can send you some pics. Many are hard to tell from the pics, but when you put the scraper in your hand (or a smaller hand like my wifes), they fit like a glove. Even have faint grooves where your finger goes.
coferrels, go ahead and send me some pics. I have another piece that I think is a scraper, fits exactly in my hand so that the sharpest edge would be where I could put the greatest pressure. Very cleverly made, really.
wissers3 @enter.net
Take the space out of the address when you use it. Thanks.
Well I hope someone posts some pictures. I would like to see the points as well as the scrapers.
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