Saturday, June 22, 2013

A lucky week- Part 2

In the days after all my finds on June 9 I found a few hours after work to go and hit some favorite spots. I walked quite a bit in one place where I have found a lot of stuff before, hoping that the rains might have exposed something new, but there just wasn't a lot of exposure and I came up with nothing. On the way home I stopped at another place for only about 15 minutes. I got excited when I saw this:
Unfortunately it is not as nice as I hoped it would be, it is a small stemmed point made of argillite, broken, and rather crudely made.
I also found another argillite artifact in that same spot, but even more crude, maybe a really rough knife or scraper, or a preform.
The next day I spent a lot of time in that same spot and found only two strange quartz artifacts that I can't readily identify. One is like a Squibnocket Triangle with a stem coming out of one corner(?). The other is maybe a broken drill.

Saturday, June 15, I returned to the spot where I had had so much luck the previous Sunday. As I wrote, I didn't have a lot of time there the first time and so I just blasted through looking for obvious stuff. I hoped that if I checked the whole place again, more carefully, I would have more luck. And I did. It had rained quite a bit since my previous visit, too, and new stuff was exposed. This small stemmed point (Wading River) is missing its tip but it looked great on the ground, with the stem sticking out.

I was specifically focusing on looking for materials other than quartz. But in this place, I kept finding broken quartz arrowheads. I read a survey of collections from eastern Massachusetts prepared by an archaeologist that indicated that while collections from north of the Mass Pike consisted of about 50 percent quartz arrowheads, collections from the southeastern part of the state were dominated by quartz.




 I finally did find something that was not quartz. This argillite piece really got my heart pumping! Unfortunately it is just a broken part of a blade, I was really disappointed.

Here is a strange one. It's whole, I'm not sure what to call it really. Maybe a specialized tool, a perforator or a drill of some kind?

I found these two small stemmed points within a few feet of each other.

Here are a few photos of some of the better finds from both trips to this small area, once I had got them home and cleaned off most of the dirt. I think this has to be the most productive area I have ever searched, based on sheer quantity.




2 comments :

pwax said...

Very nice. Personally I like the large crude argillite blade.

Chris Pittman said...

Thanks. The argillite piece just looked so nice on the ground and when I pulled it from the dirt it was not what I had hoped it would be. It doesn't show a lot of flaking, it's broken.