Wednesday, March 05, 2014

Not much....

2014 was the second year in a row that I did not find an arrowhead in the month of February. Too much snow on the ground.

I went out on Saturday in the afternoon. The first day of March, a new month, one with more promise of being able to find something. Most of my favorite spots are still covered with snow so I went to a place right on the coast. Conditions were perfect, the ground totally bare, no footprints to distract me. Unfortunately, the icy wind coming off the water was relentless, howling. With my back to the wind it was tolerable but going the other way, facing into the wind- even bundled up as I was, it was too much. I left there and went to a different place sheltered from the gusts of cold wind. The surface of the ground was covered with broken shells from centuries of feasting, mixed with countless stone flakes from making tools. Well, here is something.
It's a triangular quartz arrowhead, missing one corner. It's crude, chunky. It's a find and I am glad to have it. Here it is cleaned up at home along with a broken fragment from the first place.
That broken fragment is a piece of something that was wonderful. It's paper thin, the workmanship is exquisite, the edges are intricately flaked, sharp and straight. The red material with white crystals is really pretty. It's such a small fragment I can't even say what this was a piece of but I suspect this was one corner of a very big triangle. It's tantalizing and things like this keep my imagination fired up when I find them in places where most of what I spot are crude tools and quartz points. I hope that there is a whole one like this for me to find somewhere, and you need to find a lot of broken ones to find whole ones... I will keep looking.

1 comment :

pwax said...

How did you ever find bare earth to examine? Snow is still 2 feet deep up here a few miles to the north.
Nice red material.