On a hilltop south of Sloan Canyon, NV

 

Note various signs of ceremonialism in the foreground.

A good day arrowhead hunting

Sometimes on a good day you find more than one arrowhead. The ensemble takes on a particular life of its own: the life of that day in the field. Each time you go out you have the focus that you bring to the moment and you have the conditions that are there anyway. Out of this and mother luck come a find or two, a deep sense of accomplishment and a frame captured by the arrowheads. I love the stems on these arrowheads:

Or

Woo hoo! Thank you Rhode Island.

Nevada Colors

I have to imagine there is some turquoise rock in there:

(north west end of the Spring Mountains)

What is wrong with 100K years ago for the "First American"?

According to the internet (I have been curious about bighorn sheep):

The ancestors of bighorn sheep resided in the mountain and desert regions of Eurasia from early Pleistocene. Crossing the Bering land bridge during the late Pleistocene (100,000 years ago), they spread to mountains of Europe, North Africa, Asia and North America. True goats (Capra) are closest relatives. May 16, 2023

Since there were reasonably competent hominids all over Asia by that time, I cannot imagine why they could not have walked in the same places as those "First Sheep".

American archaeology is such garbage. There are unsolved problems all around and data going unexplored. But it seems most of the money goes to studying pretty pottery.

Is that a petroglyph of a hunting site "bullseye"?

I have been collecting pictures of what I call "funnels". The vocabulary hasn't stabilized yet but I am talking about a "bullseye" pattern of: bald spot, surrounded by light ring of lithic debris, surrounded by a heavier ring of lithic debris, surrounded by a one or more concentric rings of fence post holes. Like this:

And like this:

You see this bullseye pattern over and over in the hills around Las Vegas and I dare say: the inner ring of lithic debris might be a good place to go look carefully at the ground ;)

Imagine my surprise to see this petroglyph, which is not a bad match to these bullseyes:

A few sites have some structure or extra debris at the center but mostly not.

Update: Here it is again:

How about this one:

It re-enforces the idea of a connection with sheep.

Guidelines for visiting ceremonial stone landscape (CSL) sites

The Friends of Nashobah and the Friends of Pinehawk are discussing guidelines for public use of CSL's in the Littleton and surrounding Middlesex area. In response to one iteration of proposed guidelines, I wrote:

I am afraid I do not agree with the "broad strokes" of these guidelines. In particular, the religious overtones seem wrong and not in the public's interest. 

I am against the privatization of public resources and of America's past; which I believe belongs to everyone. Everyone should "let the landscape speak", without being told how to experience it. So, I believe it is a poor choice to prevent photography; and I think it is in-appropriate to ask people to say a prayer. 

Teach visitors to be non-destructive and respectful. Tell interesting stories. Otherwise, do not tell visitors what to think or create guidelines that put barriers between them and an experience of the landscape. Insisting that CSL's be perceived only through the lense of modern Native thinking is a bad idea. The goal should be to create lasting memories - which everyone should do in their own way. 

More recent iterations of the guidelines are trending, I think, in this direction.  I think the leaders of those groups are doing an admirable job, putting themselves at the center of a difficult and profound discussion. Readers are invited to comment.

Mystery Dots in the Desert -Coyote Spring, NV

If I told you these white "dots" are man-made, would you believe me? They look like a source of infinite, interesting speculation. [Click in to magnify] 

Those dots are found everywhere in Nevada, especially associated to hunting (in my opinion). But probably serving in other roles as well. They are very clearly defined here. One notes the variety of sizes. One notes they are missing from the left side of the picture.

I am mystified why no one has commented on them - although I would not know how to look up "white desert spot". If I learned that all those alignments I see with white dots, was just a random geology or biology, it would be disappointing. 

Update: In fact the uniformity and lack of clustering cannot be random. One could estimate the minimum distance between adjacent dots of a given dot diameter. The spacing seems proportional to the dot diameter and limited to multiples of a single basic unit.

BUT: Plants could grow in a way that keeps them separated. 

Animal Head Boulder

[Jeff from RI writes:] 

I know of many sites that are not mentioned anywhere else.

 

Wanted to share this photo with you, its uncanny resemblance to some kind of animal is undeniable. I won't disclose it just yet, but this is found in an area with rich native American history (Nipmuc probably). It's not a secret, but it gets overlooked. 

Let me know if you'd like more info!

Circular Ditch-and-Mound in the land of Nashoba

 [Dan Boudillion writes:]

Do you recall the earthen circles Mavor-Dix reported at the Boxborough esker?

I found something like that a few miles away using Lidar and confirmed it on the ground. 

 

For refence, here are the esker circles on Lidar:

And here is what I noticed on Lidar a few miles away:

These are in a heavily wooded area, in a swale.  They are about 30 feet across, and constructed but digging a shallow circular ditch and piling the dirt in the middle. They are lined up exactly to magnetic north. 

 

I don’t have pictures because it was not possible to capture the structures with a camera due to forestation, size, and shallowness of the ditches.  In fact, had I not been looking for them and GPS-ed the exact location, I would not have seen them even if I walked over them, they are that subtle on the ground.

 

Anyway, any thoughts on these?  I don’t know what they are, either here, or at the esker. 

[Peter writes:]

Apparently circular mound/ditch features have been discussed before on this blog:

Rock Piles: Re-reading Dan Boudillion about the Boxborough Esker and Circular-Ditch-and-Mound

I think the Dunstable example is north of Frederick's Corner.

Pattern recognition till I am blue in the face

Looking at satellite views of the desert on Google Earth is addictive behavior and turns up one puzzling pattern after another. I am going to tell you that the white funnel you see here:

...is a very typical hunting site in the southern Nevada and northwestern AZ....On top of a low mesa...a lighter bowl with a darker ring. The black ring at the edge of the mesa is geology but the dark ring around the white patch, with gradation, (probably) includes lithic debris.

Bighorn sheep like to climb up on tops of things. Looking at where they have worn the hillsides and ridges to a "threadbare" white patch - for example in the funnel - it is clear they like to get up on top of things. I believe is is so they can look around; not just for food browsing opportunities. 

The sheep have excellent eyesight. I watched a modern Bighorn sheep hunt on YouTube and every time the hunters got their binoculars focused on a distant animal, say 2 miles away, you could see the sheep looking back directly at the hunter. The hunters chased after the sheep, tried to sneak up on them, and eventually took a shot from 1/4 mile away. This is not at all what ancient hunters would do. They knew where to wait, and how to get the animals to within reach of their spears. I think they let the animals betray themselves. I think a hunt might have taken a day or so, while animals were slowly herded up to a funnel. An unexpected change of wind direction could spoil several days work.

Be that as it may, what is driving me crazy is trying to understand the little white dots that keep showing up in the pictures of game trails, where I think a hunting "trap" was arranged. 

The game trail crosses the mesa in a vertical direction. Looking at the pattern of white dots, there is not much doubt if you could measure alignment as a positional correlations along different directions, then the best directions are ones that are more or less parallel with the game trail. In other words, all those white dots form alignments parallel with the game trail. For what? I do not see how it could be geology.

Here is another funnel. Given examples of white dot alignments like this:

It is pretty clear that some of the white dots are deliberate products of man. In this case it looks like the dots are part of a fence that encourages game to go into the center of the funnel. Here is a closeup of the center:

Hmm? More stone walls. Hunter's blinds I guess.

Anyway, with examples like the low mesa above [which is near Red Lake AZ], I start looking at the dots near funnels and I can't decide if they are natural or man made. If man made, why would they need so many of them? 

It seems inevitable that questions like this are going to keep me busy until February, when I get to go and check some of these things on foot, and get out of Google Earth.

Colors of Nevada

 Good lord this place is colorful! [Beaver Peak]

Here is another  (Fire Mountain, AZ).

What a place.

Discovering hunting sites in southern Nevada

Frustrated to be stuck at home, I have taken to exploring via Google Earth, and leveraging the fact that debris from stone tool making ("debitage", "lithic debris", ..., "black gold") is visible from satellite views of the Nevada desert. There are places at the edges of an ancient river or lake where humans have left a "bathtub ring" of lithic debris you can see from the air. Southern Nevada is bone dry and the archaeology goes all the way back. Lithic debris is deep and abundant. 

I am going back to Las Vegas in February. The more I look at pictures, the more I learn about several different topographies where you can detect lithic debris.  I cannot wait to go back. I have been making videos and, to some extent, keeping my planned destinations secret. But there is such abundance, why not let everyone participate in the information? It reminds me of finding rock piles sites and struggling with whether to publicize their locations. 

So here is one video about lithic debris, in general, and two videos examining hunting sites south of Las Vegas. I am excited to learn what game "funnels" look like and I started noticing what look like fence post alignments connected to the concentrations of lithic debris. One starts to understand how to trap mountain sheep.

Video 1  - General Discussion [23 minutes]

Video 2 - Hunting sites south of Las Vegas. [7 minutes]

Video 3 - Drive lines, hunters blinds, and more details. [14 minutes]

Producing YouTube videos.

I have been making videos (mostly about Nevada archaeology) on my YouTube channel:

Peter Waksman - YouTube

One of my videos got 14K views and now I am hooked.

Small stone circles with standing stone center

[Norman Muller writes about this post] 

I saw the video clip you posted of "Mysterious Rock Structures in Great Smoky Mts. NP" and the circular structure posted reminded me of a photo of a similar structure I had saved on my computer, which was presumably found in Cades Cove in TN. (see attached).  Larry Harrop photographed a similar feature somewhere in RI (see second image below).

[Now, Peter writes]

A rock pile with a central stone is a common design. I personally think the central rock was probably for casting a shadow, as suggested by the video author. I did a search of this blog for the word "fin", which gave these and several other examples:

Best arrowhead finds 2023

It's the last day of the year, a time for me to look back. These are my favorite arrowhead finds from this year. 

I found these at 8 different sites in 6 towns in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. These are typical local materials: mostly quartz, with rhyolite, felsite and quartzite. They span thousands of years of time. The triangular and small stemmed forms are typical finds in the areas I search. I found most of them in the spring which is usually the most productive time for me. 

The fragment at bottom left is an important find for me. This is part of a bifurcate base projectile point. This could be 8 to 9 thousand years old and likely is the oldest tool I have found to date. Finding a bifurcate base point has been a goal for me since I began this pursuit. 

I have been putting some time in this month hoping for one more decent find for the year but have not come up with anything worth showing. It does not get easier for me to find these things. The loss of agricultural land and changes in farming practices together with me pounding many of the same spots for ten plus years have made finds fewer and farther between. But, I have had worse years than this, I still have fun looking and, if I put the time in, it is still possible every now and then to find something among the weeds.

I am grateful for being able to look, for the time I spent looking, for the spots I have and for all my finds. Best wishes to everyone for lots of luck in 2024.

Mysterious Rock Structures found Hidden in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park!

Mysterious Rock Structures found Hidden in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park! (youtube.com)

Diamond and Horns

"Diamond" and Horns(?) on Big Snake head, Peck Hill in Woodbridge CT??

From Tim MacSweeney

[PWAX says: Tim may be thinking this represents Unktena (various spellings) the Water Spirit with a pearl (or diamond) on its head. Quartz is not common in Woodbridge CT.]

The Stones We Carry - O'Riordan PhD Thesis Defence

For a PhD Dissertation at University of Connecticut. This compares approaches to studying Ceremonial Stone Structures (or ignoring them).

CLICK HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbC2vPabNHo

[Corrected] Surveying the stone tool making debris in the neighborhood of a little Nevada Hill

This is an addendum to the overview posted here.

Small Children , Small Stone Prayers, Small Turtle Effigies (Nonnewaug CT)

 

  “Historically, archaeologists have devoted few resources to understanding the social roles and activities of children...Lucy (2005) attributes part of the problem to the unwillingness of many archaeologists to include children in their interpretations unless there is direct evidence, usually mortuary, of a child's presence…"

From: "Playing with method: testing one approach towards identifying the places of past children" -Mackenzie Cory (2020)

More:

https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2023/12/small-children-small-stone-prayers.html