Last weekend

Last Thursday, April 25 I got up before dawn so I could get out for an hour before work and look for stuff. It was pouring rain, really coming down hard. The rain exposes new stuff and makes arrowheads on the ground easy to spot, it also can turn the ground into viscous mud and quickly soak through even a sturdy coat. I had a lot of hope of finding a nice arrowhead but it was not to be. I did find a bunch of fragments, mostly badly broken corners of smashed quartz triangles.

I have a lot of quartz triangles missing tips and corners, and I have a lot of tip and corner fragments. None of them match up but some day, eventually, I will find a match. This broken point was a real heartbreaker. The black rhyolite is an attractive material and the equilateral straight-sided triangle is an interesting shape. This was a thin and well-flaked arrowhead, unfortunately now very badly damaged, missing the tip and one corner.

Saturday April 27 I had a whole day free to search. I went back to finish searching a new spot I had found the week before. I found a broken quartz projectile point fragment right away, I had a really good feeling. But after hours of searching I had little more than a sunburn. Shown are the finds for the day- a stemmed base fragment, a lanceolate base fragment, a tip fragment, and a piece of an English clay pipe stem from more recent times.

The thing is, you have to find a lot of broken pieces and fragments to find an arrowhead that is still complete after all this time. Any find is a good find for me but the whole arrowheads are the biggest thrill, broken arrowheads have value and meaning but there is always that disappointment that I could not have been lucky enough to get a whole tool. But I did have some good luck after work on Friday, April 26. My friend Dave and I went out to search a place he identified where we have found stuff before, a sandy slope that goes down to the water. I hoped the heavy rain on Thursday morning might have been enough to create some nice conditions for searching there. But, conditions were really bad. It was as dry as the Sahara, each step resulting in a little dust cloud. Few rocks were visible at all, just dry sand and dust. In such conditions I will pick up literally every broken rock. And that was lucky for me. I saw a broken edge that was exactly the same color as the dirt. I scooped it up with zero expectation that it was anything other than just a rock. I was stunned to see this:

I'm really happy with this. I believe this is a Levanna and I think the material is hornfels. Here it is cleaned up at home along with two other triangles made from the same or a similar material, that I found some years ago, in a different place.