My best arrowhead find of 2025

I apologize for my long absence from these pages. Arrowheads have gotten harder for me to find. The area where I live is increasingly built on and built up. Farm fields become housing developments or solar panels. I am sure there are great sites yet to be discovered but drives to potential new spots (that are likely void) are increasingly long and thus less appealing. After years of collecting, spending a whole day for a couple of broken quartz fragments does not have the same value proposition it once did for me. I still have a few favorite spots left, and I did add a few pieces to my collection this year, of which this was my favorite. 

I found this in May in a place where there is sand and not a lot of rocks. One walks slowly, examining every stone. There is not a lot to find but sometimes there is something really special waiting to be discovered. Suddenly there is a rush of excitement at the sight of an exposed sliver of stone. You think: this is it. This is what I came here for.

Now, the really fun part. You savor the moment, take some photos. You crouch down and examine the thing. It certainly looks good but it could be anything, it could be broken, it could be just a rock, a "faker." You try to visualize what it might be, picture some wonderful thing coming out of the ground. A lot of the time there is a disappointment when you pick it up. Not this time, though.

I hope everyone finds more of whatever they are looking for in 2026. Thanks to Peter for keeping this blog going for all these years. Happy New Year to all.

Viewership Changes Here

For many years this blog has had a small community of daily visitors. Somewhere between 30 and 100 on any given day. One time, I suddenly got a flood of several thousand visitors, and it was interesting in two ways. One is that it made me uncomfortable to suddenly have "strangers" showing up. The other was that I tracked the visitors back to two different webpages that had simultaneously linked to me on a story about a flint knife blade made from exotic flint - found somewhere in the US. As it turned out one of the two webpages was a political/conspiracy theory page, accused of being a CIA front; while the other was a seemingly innocuous "find love" dating site. Who knew the CIA was doing these experiments?

Anyway, something funny happened recently: Both the Rock Piles blog and my Sphinxmoth blog had multiple repeated visits from a server in Singapore. [I can read these details because I have an embedded "STATCOUNTER".] At first Sphinxmoth had several hundred visits for several day. Then the craziness started: I am getting more than 3K daily visits to Rock piles from all over the world!

These are strangers, in no way devoted to rock piles and they are coming in with search strings that make no sense, like this:

https://rockpiles.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2011-05-10T08:34:00-04:00&max-results=100&reverse-paginate=true&start=26&by-date=false&m=1

Nobody would type this, so I am thinking it is a link from somewhere [connected to Singapore] that thousands are clicking on every day. I think someone is making a little money of this blog's content.

All of which makes me want to make some money too - off a flood of non-enthusiasts who, by coincidence, happen to be passing by. 

SO, I HAVE A QUESTION FOR THE ROCK PILE COMMUNITY: 

HOW ABOUT A DISCRETE ADD OR TWO ON THE LEFT PANEL

Merry Solstice

Hope we all have a good year.

PA Rock Piles....here somewhere

 Have We Finally Found It? ~ Ghost Village Searching

You just know this guy is going to pass rock piles. The question is: will he say something intelligent about them?

The Indian Cave just below Tousi Road (Hatchett Tousey, Atchetouset, Hatchatowsuck, Hatchatousset )

.   “In the spring of 1996, I was shown what is known locally as the “Indian Cave.” It’s a little over two miles upriver from the floodplains that were the cornfields used by a band of local Native Americans whom local history documents as living there between 1672/1673 and the early 1700’s. A tributary branch of the river that flows through the floodplain, known as the East Spring (or Sprane) Brook, cuts through a large outcrop of bedrock, creating a zigzag ravine shadowed by hemlocks. Boulders in the stream create many pools, the largest of which was right below “Indian Cave,” before an intense summer thunderstorm caused flooding that filled the pool with stones and debris. I tended to think of it as “Plunge Pool” and imagined people leaving the Pissepunk and jumping into this pool. The “cave” is on the west bank, about six feet above the brook. It bears some resemblance to an overhanging glacial cave, perhaps a very small “rockshelter” in the approximately forty-foot almost vertical rock face. There are no obvious marks of any metal stone cutting tools or drills but I think it possible that it may have been quarried to its present size. From the brook to the floor of the “cave” there appears to be rows of stone piled and even “chinked” or mortared with clay (there was a large deposit of clay a short distance upstream) that still remains deep within this sort of “retaining wall” just beyond the drip line of the overhang. The deep pool below the “cave” seems filled with stones that fell from the wall over time, as if the “cave” itself was walled at one time.” From: https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2007/01/indian-cave.html

    On December 7, 2025, I just happened to re-read a passage from William Cothren’s History of Ancient Woodbury Connecticut that included place names related to the town’s past, including “Tousey” which “lies north-west of William Hayes' house, in the south-east part of Bethlehem, and is so called from a Christian Indian, who lived there for a time. His full name was Hatchet Tousey. A further account of him will be found on page 101.” I don’t know why it took almost thirty years for me to realize that the probable stone sweat lodge or pissepunk known locally as the Indian Cave just below the end of present day Tousi Road was related to Hachett Tousey, the father of famed Paugussett basket maker Molly Hatchett.

History of Ancient Woodbury, Connecticut, from the First ... - Page 852

books.google.com › books

William Cothren · 1872