I have been spending a lot of time out searching for artifacts and finding mostly just broken pieces and fragments. My best find from Memorial Day weekend was this nice thin intact quartz Wading River point, my first whole arrowhead from Rhode Island. The water in the background is the Atlantic Ocean. Nicely made thin quartz points like this were really difficult to make, quartz is a very hard material to work that most modern flintknappers won't touch.
Saturday I stayed home all day listening to the wind and rain outside. Heavy rain and storms fill me with anticipation, I think about places where artifacts might be eroding out of the ground and I plan out places to go, always trying to go to the most likely and productive places first. There is one spot I go to that is very dusty, where the exposed soil quickly hides exposed rocks when conditions are dry. I decided that would be my first stop on Sunday, I wanted to look there before it dried out.
When I got out of my car first thing Sunday morning I was a little disappointed, there didn't seem to be much new exposure and everything looked more or less the same as it did the last time I went there. I don't know if it didn't rain heavily there Saturday, or if it just wasn't enough rain to wash out much new stuff. Despite this I still spent two and a half hours carefully searching. I spotted this little piece of broken quartz and stapped a picture before picking it up, really expecting it to be just another chip or flake, having found very many of those in this place where Indians must have lived long ago.
When I picked it up it came out with a clump of dirt, I rubbed the dirt away and was very pleased to find that the exposed part was the tip of a nice small triangular arrowhead.
This is a nice find for me, it is not too crude and it is small and was not easy to spot. And it is not broken. After I found this I poked around a little more and left. I met up with my friend Dave, he enjoys searching for old objects with a metal detector and he has found some nice artifacts while out exploring. Dave told me about a place he had found on a farm this year where the farmer had plowed some ground that Dave hadn't seen plowed before. I thought it would be worth checking but found it to be very muddy, not the type of well-drained sandy soil that Indians seem to have liked to camp on. I didn't expect to find anything but looked for a little while anyway in the drier spots, I was very surprised when I spotted this:
That's a quartz arrowhead trying to hide under a little piece of dirt. Unfortunately it is broken.
It's really too bad about the damage as this is very finely made out of a wonderful clear quartz material. I don't know if I have ever found a tool made from a better quality quartz, it is like glass. I was happy to find it.
We both looked carefully in that place for a while but I didn't find even one other artifact, not even one of the ubiquitous quartz chips and flakes. Maybe this was not a place where people lived, perhaps this piece was lost during a hunt long ago, an isolated find. Dave and I went to another place not far away where I have found stuff before. I concentrated on searching a slope where I found stuff in the past while Dave carefully looked in another area where I have looked before but never found anything. I had an average outing finding only broken pieces, a felsite midsection fragment and a narrow point missing the tip and base made from a very strange material I have not found before, pink with purple spots! I think it is a type of rhyolite.
Meanwhile, in the area I have been ignoring, Dave found these...
They are both broken but are still knockouts made from lovely non-local materials. The big one is an Adena point made of an exotic flint, probably from the Ohio River valley. I have never found anything like that! I am a little jealous but won't hesitate to search that area in the future, maybe there is another one there for me to find, someday... The people who made these Adena points were a different culture from the people who make the tools I usually find. They are rare in this area.
5 comments :
Great luck. I gave it a try too last weekend but only came home with flakes. An Adena point...imagine! Love the material. Isn't that hornfels?
That Adena is flint, I am pretty certain. In the pictures (taken in the field) it is still dirty, it is also patinated from centuries underground. But it is smooth and in hand it feels like a piece of glass. The hornfels I have is more coarse, grainy. I (was and am) jealous of Dave's finds. I knew what that Adena was at a glance, so distinctive. If it had been whole, I think I would have started to cry. I'm not sure on the material on the dark-colored triangle that Dave found, it has white streaks in it. That one could maybe be hornfels.
The last picture shows the damaged base. It is an unusual pattern of breakage. If the break was ancient - what might have caused it? Usually an arrowhead is snapped off perpendicular to its long axis; or an ear at the base is broken off.
And that clear point is sooo pretty. I hope you find a complete one sometime.
I'm not sure what caused the unusual break. The broken surface is patinated so I don't think the damage is particularly recent, though I suppose it is not necessarily ancient either. The artifacts found at this site seem to span thousands of years of time. If this broke during use I would imagine it would have been reworked into a smaller tool. I suppose it could have been lost and then stepped on by an animal, or broken with a stone hoe when the land might have been cultivated by later Indians, or with a metal hoe by colonists who might have farmed there, I can only speculate, really. But certainly not a typical break.
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