Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Mostly broken stuff

This past weekend I went out and spent some time looking for arrowheads. I worked pretty hard at it but came up with nothing. I can't complain, though, because I had some pretty good luck in a couple of places the previous weekend, May 10-12. We had had some really heavy rains, I couldn't wait to get out to look because I knew I would find at least something. Not a lot of quality artifacts, but it might have been my weekend record in terms of quantity if you count all the broken tools I found. Here is a picture of the total finds for that weekend, Friday through Sunday.
There are broken arrowheads, fragments of arrowheads, a couple of scrapers, a broken scraper, and a few mostly whole arrowheads. Incredibly, most of that stuff was found in two hours on Friday after work. This picture shows just the Friday finds.
All quartz. That big thing on the left is a scraper (I think), crude but whole. Number 4 in the second row is nicely made and it is a shame it is broken. There are three (relatively) whole arrowheads: a big chunky triangle showing a lot of wear, a super thin point probably reworked down from something else, and a tiny triangle, with flaking on one side only, carefully chipped from a quartz flake.
Saturday morning I got out there again and found a few more crude or broken pieces. The one in the middle below is a hafted scraper, it is made that way and has a stem like an arrowhead, pretty neat. That red rhyolite arrowhead is broken and was not well made but the material is pretty.
Sunday Dave and I went to a different place. I spotted this after less than five minutes. It's right in a vehicle track as you can see. When I spotted it I assumed it would be broken.
But, it wasn't. I think the material is felsite. My best find in a while, I was really excited by this one.
Dave and I searched there for hours but came up with very little. Dave found a broken base of a huge quartz triangle, it would have been massive. A little while later I found a very similar base! I don't have any other points of this shape and size, even broken ones like this. The one Dave found is the top one in this picture.
It's raining again as I write this. Somewhere out there in the dark, stone tools wait to be picked up.

2 comments :

pwax said...

Go for it Chris!

STx361 said...

Spear points, thrusting spears and projectiles. VERYold site. The fact that there arent any notches tells me this. Just my opinion sir. :)