First finds in 2013

I had some time on Saturday morning to go out and search for arrowheads before the really heavy rain started. It has rained quite a bit here lately, in theory this makes for good conditions for searching for arrowheads. The reality on Saturday, though, was that the amount of rain had turned the ground into a quagmire. Standing water all over the place, just mud and ooze to wade through everywhere. Just looking at it before I even got out of my car was giving me the creeps. But I had driven for a while to get to this place, and it has been productive for me in previous winters, so I couldn't resist spending a couple of hours there despite everything. It reminded me of times in warm weather when I have waded in streams or along the edges of lakes looking for stuff, I got pretty soaked. Anyway, I didn't find anything really great but nothing much is certainly better than nothing at all. This broken quartz small stemmed arrowhead was the best of my finds, I pulled it out of a puddle. It's missing the tip and I think the base is broken as well.

Here are all of my finds. I'm not sure what that big piece in the center is, I would like to call it a knife, perhaps it is a scraper or maybe just a preform that was discarded. It's definitely worked but pretty crude, it does look like a tool to me but I don't know. There are some broken fragments of quartz arrowheads and two pieces of English or Dutch clay tobacco pipes, from later times.

 On Sunday morning I had a chance to take a very short walk in a sandy place I like. I had less than an hour to search. It had rained really hard the night before and conditions were amazing. As soon as I got out there I was picking up nice big flakes of neat materials, different types of rhyolite and felsite. I was feeling really good, I had that feeling that with any step I might stumble on something really special. This broken edge sticking out of the ground looked really intriguing. I snapped one quick photo before I scooped it up.

It's a Stark point!!! Broken, unfortunately. But most of it is there and I was really super excited to find it. It's made of argillite as many of these are. I love finding things like this, I don't have many of these, even broken.

Here are the best of my weekend finds cleaned up at home. Not bad. I hope to get back to that sandy place this weekend when I have more time. I would love to find a whole Stark like that broken one...