Pocemtuck Festival - Aug 5, 6

 

I wrote a book: A Shadow Under The Rock

MOVED TO SIDEBAR ---->

Now on Amazon. 

A visit to the Robbins Museum - Home of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society.

Went to visit what is surely one of the great displays of arrowheads to be seen anywhere. I have complex thoughts about how most of museum's pieces rival my own best finds. And about mortality: The folks who collected those arrowheads are as gone as the people who made them. At the same time those beautiful points mean much less to me than my own finds. I am already forgetting the stories of how I found my own and, when they end up in the museum my sense of their beauty will be gone. Meanwhile, look at this!

These are the shouldered points I am most enamored with at the moment. Never found any in Concord like those.

A fine display:

Liking the "green" argillite:

Gregg Lott, VP of the MAS

Jake ...(could not catch the last name). President of MAS.

Knowledgeable guys, and friendly. Continuing:

These are said to be atlatl counterweights

And here are a lot more:

I think these displays are in very good taste.

Wow.

North Shore Cape Cod Arrowhead

A young colleague, Spencer Chosse, told me about this place. I was looking hard and got very lucky. The beach environment offers many hundreds of rocks per square foot but I had slowed down in one place, because there were a few more broken rocks than I'd been seeing. In this one spot, I was looking at each of the rocks. This one could just as well have turned out to be nothing. That is the real luck.

Update: I should include this as well:

The beauty of simple things

 

Tidal Flats - another intersection between arrowheads and rock piles

I was hunting for arrowheads on the tidal flats of Barnstable MA and saw a couple of stone structures while I was at it. One was a modern arrow pointing to a peace symbol and a heart symbol - all made from piled cobbles below the high tide line. But I thought this, in the foreground, was a familiar pattern from the ancient world:

You see an outline with a larger rock at one end. 

BTW, hunting for small bits of flaked rock against this visual background is exhausting.

Quartz artifacts from North Shore of Cape Cod

A walk around the neighborhood

Every time I look more carefully, I find more rock piles in the backyards of the mansions around the Woods Hole Golf Course. There used to be a site that stretched from Gansett over to the fire station. Today, it is mostly well tended grass.

See that one over on the left?

Happy solstice

 Enjoy the day.

Attleboro Rhyolite - a nice example from southern New England

 

Everyone likes nice stone tool work.

News about the Nashoba Praying Indians

Dear Friends of the Nashobah Praying Indians,

 

We have a big announcement today – Strong Bear Medicine is moving to town [Littleton] in July! 

 

He will be living on Nashobah Praying Indian ancestral land in a location that is significant to his people.

 

It’s been around 300 years since the last known Praying Indian (Sarah Doublet) lived in town on Praying Indian Plantation land.  This is a really big deal, not only to Bear and his people, but to the community as well.  After all these years, this is an amazing turn of events. 

 

When Strong Bear gets settled in, he will be planning and hosting cultural events in town and the local area, and we expect to see a lot of him, both with this and around town. 

I will keep you updated on Nashobah events – you will be the first to know – and on ways we can help the Nashobah as they become part of the community.  There are several such things that come to mind, more on this in upcoming updates.

 

Next week I’ll have an update on the next step of the Nashobah book project, and will be looking for people to help bring it forward.  (We need to get the book into the local libraries, historical societies, schools, etc.)

Best wishes!

Dan

Dreaming of the Pawnee Grasslands - highly polished tools

I did not realize at the time that these were the same sorts of implement. It makes me want to go back to the Pawnee Grasslands of Colorado and look for others.

The lower left edge is sharpened and damaged. The back side of the orange one has some hard-use abrasion:

I have to say, these rocks were more confusing than usual. First of all, what are these things? And second of all, why are they both so polished?

Well I am going to say they are some kind of swiss army knife - combining a cutting edge with an abrading surface. 

It took me a while to remember what makes rocks so shiny. It is when they have spent a long time in someone pocket. So I am only speculating that these people were very mobile. They kept their best swiss army knife with them. These tools spent a lot of time in someone's pocket.

Concord arrowheads

A colleague, Spencer, found these in my old hometown:

A nice find from Massapoag

One of the best arrowheads I found this winter. Something like a "Snappit" projectile point:

Goodbye to Boulder

Rock climbers like these rock faces - the Flatirons -  in Boulder CO.

We took a stroll around Chatauqua Park. I noticed this above:

(Look just below  the line of trees on top of the hill.)

Ceremonial Sites on the way to and from Gold Lake, CO

Went to look for arrowheads up in the mountains in a "gentle valley" in the mountains not far from Boulder CO. On the way there, along Lee Hill Rd, there was a rock pile site at the high point. Private land prevented a good look. Here is what I could see:     

A little crisper:

So that was nice and I wish I could have gotten a better look. 

Then we went by dirt road (lost the County Rd numbers) to Gold Lake. On the way back I noticed this next to the road:

It leaves me with the impression that there are plenty of active Native American ceremonies going on. Here is a place New Englander's might get some insights into rock piling. I think my family was getting tired of my shouting...."wait! stop the car".

Hunting for Archeology near Boulder CO, Day 3 - Gold Lake

Before visiting Boulder I picked some places that looked worth exploring for arrowheads. One was the Pawnee Grasslands, just to see what was out there (see here); one was Rabbit Mountain (see here) because there were springs and the hope of finding game trails. On the third day, with my wife, son, and son's girlfriend, we explored what I hoped was a gentle valley within the Rocky Mountain National Park. I was hoping for an upland environment that was not strenuous for hiking, looked around the topo map and picked Gold Lake. 

Gold Lake, east of Ward CO, is a private campground. Later I decided that $210 for a night and three meals, would have been cheaper than staying at a hotel. Anyway, we ran into a guard who warned us off, and told us a few things about the area. I mentioned we were looking for arrowheads [you never know what you might learn] and he said this place, Gold Lake, was where the Arapahoe Chief Niwot spent summers. So my choice was a good one. All of the lake, and especially the northern shore, are private and closed. It turned out that south of the lake was national park with "unrestricted camping". So we drove over there and spent a couple hours poking around and trespassing, by sneaking in to look at the lakeshore, from a spot that could not be seen from the north. An artificial lake, they had drained it a bit:

Fire rings:

Debitage:

Gosh, I wanted to walk along that beach! The white stuff is, again, chalcedony - a form of SiO2 that has different structure from crystalline quartz. 

I think this is not quartz but not sure. Two pieces of worked edge, lying next to each other on the sand, seemed to fit together like a "plausible blade reconstruction". I doubt this is plausible, but you can get a sense of what an arrowhead might have looked like:

And that was as close as I got to finding an arrowhead in CO. Joe and Leah walked around for a while and found beautiful bits of quartz and chert but nothing complete. Joe reported finding a black feather with orange paint on it (making me think the Indians might still be around). I think we had fun and had some great pizza in Nederland on the way home.

Hunting for Archeology near Boulder CO, Day 2 - The Ron Steward Preserve on Rabbit Mountain

Another one of the types of places in CO that seemed worth exploring for arrowheads were a few spots marked "spring" on my topo map. I picked the furthest east foothill of the Rockies I could find. I figured that, in an arid environment, a spring would be a likely place to find signs of man. Sadly most of the "nature" around Boulder is fenced off to protect it from a bike-crazed culture. 

[A brief digression for social commentary: Boulder area is overrun with physical fitness enthusiasts. For them, nature is an extension of the gym - a place for vigorous exercise. Sadly they have no idea what to do outdoors. The rivers did not even have boat launches! It makes me contemplate trying some kind of outreach, to teach them about identifying flowers, birdwatching, archeology hunting, butterflies and moths.....the list goes on. One senses that a large number of New Yorkers relocated to this area, for the rock climbing and the overall hipness of the place. On the other hand, it has the least expensive and most excellent food I have had, anywhere in America.]

Driving up to the Ron Stewart Preserve, I started to notice stone walls:

The first spring we went to on Rabbit Mountain was public land, fenced off from the public. We got lucky and found some un-fenced public trails on the western side of Rabbit Mountain. 

Everywhere, there were suggestive bits of wall, propped rocks, and outlines on the ground. Was it purely ceremonial? I doubt it. This is the traditional homeland of the Arapahoe, who where a [displaced eastern?] Algonquian speaking tribe. One imagines them sharing some stone placing traditions with the New England tribes. But we were looking for arrowheads and thinking about hunters. All the walls I got to look at carefully were designed as funnels running up the sides of slopes.

We walked up the path a bit:

I kept noticing rock-on-rock, and little hints of stone wall. After thinking about it, I conclude that animals would prefer to not step on rocks, so even a sketchy wall is enough to encourage an animal to make a choice. In this last photo there is a bit of wall along the side of the path. You could suppose they tossed rocks over there while making the path. Or you could assume the wall caused the animals to walk along that side of the wall - creating a game trail which, today, is a human one.

We left the path at an outlook, heading down over slippery rocks to get a better look at a wall. It was rainy so what is apparently a very rattlesnake-y place was safe to scramble around. There was a big wall cutting across the slope:

The wall passes a pine tree, right of center. Just left of there, is a bare place on the hill with a scatter of rocks. That is a structure. Up close: 

It turns out that just below the pine tree, there is a gap in the wall and a short stretch just below that, blocking the gap - as I'll show in a moment. I wanted to believe this 'structure' was where the hunters waited. So the arrowheads and flaking debris would be under ground here. We should have stopped and looked more carefully. We should have climbed further up hill and examined the "pass". I was over-pre-occupied with the stone wall.

Here is the pine tree, the gap is below it.

Just below the gap was a short stretch of stone wall:

At the near end:

That looks like a path. I conclude, the walls are there for animal flow control. Look closely at this. There are little hints:

We did not see a single flaked rock. I was too busy looking at arranged rocks.

Hunting for Archeology around Boulder CO, Day 1 - The Pawnee Grasslands

When else was I going to get anything like a genuine "Great Plains" experience?. Planning to visit my son in Boulder I spent weeks pouring over maps and aerial photos trying to decide where we should go look for arrowheads. 

Found the perfect spot: next to a major creek (Howard Creek), on public land (Pawnee Grasslands National Park), and signs of past plowing - with long straight lines from industrial scale plowing overlaid on curved lines from manual plowing. So the ground will have been churned. I zoomed in on a destination (up CR77 from Briggsdale, between CR96 and CR100 - figured we could pretend to be bird watching, if deception was called for) and, to my delight, spotted a marking on the map: "Arrowhead Windmill". Seemed just right.

Drove out that way (~100 miles from Boulder), getting to chat with my son, we finally arrived and stepped out. The ground was covered with chips:

Mostly chalcedony (a form of SiO2, different from quartz in its flaking properties) and jasper. We did not find arrowheads but scrapers and worked edges.

Top to bottom: a scraper made of jasper (metamorphosed chert); a chalcedony working edge; a bit of a 'hatchet' made of chert [??].

Nothing too cool but we only spent two hours out looking around. Honestly these were the most confusing things I ever looked at. At first things looked like debris, then I noticed working edges and differential polish. None of it made any sense. Perhaps the smaller items were multi-purpose.

Worth the 100 miles just to be there:

I get a laugh, zooming in on this one. Where else could you pee and scan a horizon like that?

A bit later, we walked over to Arrowhead Windmill. The water tasted a bit chalky, there were no arrowheads underfoot, but there was a bit of a structure I did not understand:

These were the only rocks visible on the surface. 

That was at the very edge of the grasslands. There is un-restricted camping throughout [in most of the Boulder area you can see nature only through a barbed-wire fence] so it would be fun to go deeper in, finding better wetlands, and spend a week basking in the emptiness.