Arrowhead madness continues

Found some nice little argillite points: 

Back home:

Comparing the placement of individual flakes, these could have been made by the same person. I found them a few yards apart.

I am quite taken with the nice proportions and careful flaking of this little point. 

You go out looking for quartz and try to block out everything that is not white. But I still spot nice flaking and, as they say on YouTube: "I'll take it".

Thick blades

Found in Rhode Island, these are quite similar:

They only look nicely flaked on one surface:

I was trying to figure out, how this 'tool' would have been used: Was it hand-held or hafted? Is it broken? It sort-of looks like the thinner portion, going up a step to the thicker portion, might be to accommodate a handle. I examined it closely and noticed a faint discoloration:

You may need to  click in to see the band of darker color. It runs all the way around the item, at the same place as where the back goes up a step to the thicker part. I have learned that this discoloration is significant and I regard it as proof hafting. That starts to explain it; and the similarity in shape between the quartz and red example makes them not seem like isolated designs. These are thick, working blades - nothing delicate about them. 

I would love to know what is the reddish material of the larger 'blade'? It is a bit like quartzite, very fine grained, colored somewhere between cranberry sauce and and coca cola.

A tiny heartbreaker

You can see it is fine flaking 

Pretty quartz.

The Ceremonial Stone Landscape Movement - a local perspective with Peter Waksman

Here is the ZOOM recording of my talk for the "Friends of Pinehawk" in Acton. It is a pretty scattered lecture but it gets some momentum towards the middle and ends better than it begins - if you have the patience to sit through it. 

 

I tried to say what I think, had too much to say, and only wince occasionally , as I listen to it now. Here is the link:

The Ceremonial Stone Landscape Movement - a local perspective on the history and topics of CSL - YouTube

"Alone Across Alaska" on TUBI TV

It is hard to escape the sense that there is more archaeology visible on the surface in the Arctic than will ever be comprehended by anyone:

A nice statement

From Tim MacSweeney's Waking up on Turtle Island:

Waking Up on Turtle Island: Former Row of Big Boulders (Part Two)

Quartz Dalton Arrowhead

Doesn't get any better than this:

From coastal RI. 

Native Americans—and their genes—traveled back to Siberia, new genomes reveal

It is about time this idea got some supporting evidence. 

Native Americans—and their genes—traveled back to Siberia, new genomes reveal | Science | AAAS

By the third paragraph, the evidence-free discussion begins but at least an obvious idea finally gets voiced. This is Science magazine, so I do not know why they remain stuck in the what is essentially a 'Clovis First' paradigm.

A closer look at my recent find

I have started to be more clear as to why I think this is a legitimate arrowhead. For example consider the symmetry and flaking:

 Other side:

It is another "flake" point. The stem is much thicker than the tip:

Here is a clincher: the details of finer serrations along just one edge:

Interestingly enough, I first saw this on the glass 'arrowhead' serrations. It suggest this is a knife, not a projectile point, which is consistent with the awkward stem.

I guess that is an arrowhead

The tip is nicely worked, but the base is quite thick. An ungainly item. Best I could come up with in a day of searching.

Protecting ancient Northhampton

From James Cachat and the Massachusetts Ethical Archaeological Society:

DOT is meeting tonight with the City of Northampton because they plan to move forward with their project on the unique ancient site in Nayyag.  This site was recommended for the National Register of Historic Places by DOT's own archaeologist.

Despite disinformation by Ms. Misch of Northampton gov't., the facts of this case are named in the attached report, along with the actual statements made in February 2021 by DOT officers and questions from the public.

Tonight at 6:30, DOT is having a meeting in Northampton that can be joined by remote.  The news report says 6 pm, but the state site says 6:30.

To join, go to: mass.gov/event and look for this meeting.  Follow instructions there.

Mark Anderson, Tribal Cultural Resources Officer for Aquinnah Wopanaak (Wompanoag) has stated on record that this site should be perserved and that it appears to be a village site.

Narragansett Tribe also stated in newsmedia their concerns for preservation at this site early in the process.

DOT is not reporting either tribe's statements in public messages.

DOT admitted in the Feb., 2021 meting (as detailed in link below) that:

1.  Traffic circles increase the number of accidents at a given intersection.

2.  The place concerned here had a below-average rate of accidents in the 5 years studied previously.

3.  There are 0 fatalities on record for this intersection.

4.  There are several known archaeological sites less than a mile from this site.

5.  The site was recommended for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places by DOT's own archaeologist.

6.  Only a couple of years earlier, DOT demolished another ancient site, 8,500 years old, less than a mile down the road from this site.

7.   A traffic light can be installed at this intersection.

8.  The most accident-prone intersection in the entire state - and the world - is a traffic circle in Longmeadow.

Foxborough Stone Ring

 [from the megalithic portal via Tommy Hudson]

Foxborough Stone Ring
Country: United States   Topic: Neolithic and Bronze Age
Do we have any readers living near Foxborough or Wrentham, between Boston and Providence Massachusetts? There are dozens of strange rock formations in this forest to explore. More information and links on this page - please send photos!. A curious ring of stones in F. Gilbert Hills State Forest (also known as Foxboro Forest) . Possible pointer stone at base. Dimensions of the structure are 8 feet long by 6 feet wide. About 1/2 mile south off of the Megley Trail on trail indicated on map. Located on the left hand side, about 200 feet off the trail, very hard to see. Recently made stone pile nearby.
http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=11590

We still don't understand what Indian life was like since 1600

All the physical evidence of my glass "arrowhead" (here and here) points to it being obviously a deliberately flaked and used piece of glass. And yet the average impression, including my own, is that of course it is not real but just a coincidence.

This is an opportunity to take a close look at that sense of disbelief. It is quite similar to the disbelief that an Indian could have made a rock pile during the last 400 years. One main point of this blog is that Indians, at all times, have made stone constructions. We hear this, we believe it, yet we still do not - in our heart-of-hearts  - really understand it. We are quite ready to abandon our own logic. For example, I do not think we grasp just how poor some Native Americans were. How can you be so poor you cannot afford a metal knife?

I am starting to think maybe glass arrowheads are not so rare - just like those pesky unbelievable rock piles. When I go poking around on "arrowheads.com" and "reddit/r/Arrowheads" a small number of other people report finding flaked glass at sites they usually prospect for older items. So it really is a thing.

Edge use exam of glass "arrowhead"

I think the edge use is definitive. The only other part of the edge with these small facets is the inside of the bend on the "stem".

Still hard to believe.

Damaged, argillite. This could be a sort of Levana but I vote for it being a sort of Dalton.

Glass "Arrowhead"

First, compare these pieces of broken glass found adjacent to each other, in a plowed cornfield. I took the photo because it is so clear that the piece on top is different:

I certainly want to believe this is a small knife.

As I've said: everyone loves nice flaking. You can see why it is worth keeping, if only to speculate about how many different blows and pressure flakes it took to make this bifacial object:

It sure is pretty. Real or not, it's going in the collection. 

The thick glass reminds me of a soda fountain milkshake glass. Actually, also thick Sandwich glass. I don't know how old that could be but, within reason, Indians with knowledge of knapping might have overlapped with the availability of glass for few hundred years. People on Arrowheads.com say Indians were knapping glass at least into the 1890's. The famous "ISHI" lived till 1916.

Other people find similar things occasionally. Here is a beauty:
https://forums.arrowheads.com/forum/general-discussion-gc5/native-american-arrowheads-other-lithic-artifacts-gc7/7636-historic-glass-arrowhead

Douglas AZ Pyramid

I decided to get a little cagey about this place. For one thing, every single feature I think is man made could easily not be or be modern. But check it out:

Wait! What!?

I'll tell you the lat/long coords if you are curious.

Nearby, this looks like a geoglyph:

Quick review of 2022

In April, I went with my wife on a driving expedition that took us to Woodbridge CT [numerous articles] and to Kings Chamber in Fahnenstock NY. A superb place. 

This was part of a move to get off of Cape Cod and see a few things; which continued after we got back, with my driving over to Freetown during weekends and discovering a few rock pile sites over there. I did not find the places Mavor and Dix describe and, clearly, the town has more to be revealed. I took a few other hikes in parts of Rhode Island adjacent to MA.

In August I started looking for arrowheads again. This was a combination of some obscure finds from the harbor islands of Woods Hole; along with Chris Pittman showing me how to use aerial photos to spot likely farm fields. I have been driving back to the mainland ever since, to explore such places. Finally, in Raynham, I found my first "independent" arrowhead by that method. Your mind is challenged to find a worthwhile location, your eyes and patience are challenged to see what is there. The more willing you are to ask permission, the more places you have to look. 

I have thoughts about the general philosophies of arrowhead hunting. Out West the ground is bare and the only problem is to choose a likely topography. Here in the East there are only a few spots of bare dirt left. The coastline is one dimensional and privately owned. Most of our creeks and rivers are completely silted-in and surrounded by muddy marshland. So it is hard to find anywhere worth looking for arrowheads here. I think the guys out west have it a lot easier. And don't get me started on the lack of knap-able materials, available in the glacial gravels down here.

Finally, in the last few days I spotted what looks like a large pyramid shaped mound in the southeastern AZ desert. This just makes me want to go drive around the west more and more.

Holiday Season Arrowhead Hunting

I had the pleasure of a visiting son who shares my enthusiasm for arrowhead hunting. Knowing some places where we might succeed, having been shown them by Chris Pittman, I went out hunting with my son. Each time, he found something but my finds were humbler:

His are on the left, mine on the right. I believe his are Stemmed Squibnocket points. The larger one shades off into what they call "Lamoka" and is, I think, quite similar to the broken stemmed point I found, on the right. 

The two concave-base items on the right are barely arrowheads. I am not sure about the bottom one, the top one is pretty clearly a reworked flake. Kinda charming:

A "skewed" arrowhead.

The base is carefully worked:

Just a little flake. 

A crude gouge from Rhode Island

Not sure why I bent over and picked this up:

It looked like it had some modifications and hope springs eternal that I might someday find a celt. 

So I turned it over, hoping to see the sharp edge of a celt. Not entirely disappointed to find the curved edge of a gouge instead:

It is not in good shape but this is a rare kind of artifact and probably worth keeping.

"Clovis First" dies again

OSU archaeologists, on Idaho dig, find oldest known projectile points in the Americas - KTVZ 

Update:

It is sad that so much focus is applied to Clovis but to few other prehistoric cultural expressions. I note that a certain type of stemmed point was nearly universal in the US, but goes un-named and never achieves the level of interest of Clovis. But the Clovis "narrative" has a combination of beautiful lithic technology and a compelling bit of nonsense about man sweeping across the continent, eliminating the megafauna along the way. With a firm belief in the dating of Clovis and a simplistic answer to the tough question of America's prehistory, it is a great story. As long as someone is still telling it, it will remain with us.

Early seafarers crossed the Mediterranean.

[Re: peopling of the Americas]

Ancient Humans May Have Sailed The Mediterranean 450,000 Years Ago : ScienceAlert

The assumption that all of our early pre-human ancestors were too dumb to walk and chew gum, seems pretty typical of a field dominated by the European male. 

Red Rhyolite/Jasper blade from a Falmouth beach

 

Back home:

After searching beaches most of my life, particularly in the last few years since finding arrowheads in Concord, it comes as a shock to actually find something recognizably flaked. It comes as a special kind of shock when rather than stumbling on an artifact, you go looking for it in a particular place.

I'll have more to say about where I found this and about coastal dune formation in Buzzard's Bay. When the dunes block a pond - as is common around here - the sense is that this used to be a river mouth before the sea level returned. So if you are looking for 5-7K years old artifacts, old river banks are one possibility. But I need to think more about how this rock got where it was on the beach, with this (minimal) level of wear.

Neeto!

The conclusion is that there must have been a pre-woodland site somewhere near where I found this.

Quartz point from Raynham, MA

First in a long time, since retiring and looking for new places to hunt. I do not really count the ones from places that Chris P. showed me (see here). I found this location all on my own by looking at aerial photos and following the strategy which Chris taught me: it is about farms next to water.

Finding this with nothing more than planning and a little foot work was deeply satisfying. It is maybe the seventh or eight place I drove to on spec. There: all I found was broken quartz, as I may have mentioned. Here: I spent an hour exploring a small 1/8 acre bit of dirt, found two broken axe bits made of quartz, only a couple quartz flakes, and this little beauty which, itself, is little more than a quartz flake. It seems somehow different in its significance to find a location by looking at maps versus already living somewhere with arrowheads (Concord) or stumbling on one during a random outing (Devil's Foot Island in Woods Hole). 

Here we are, in Raynham on the banks of the Forge River:

And here is a closeup of my find:

Quantitative measurement of the "field clearing hypothesis"

I never pulled it off but have always believed it would not be hard to prove a field clearing pile had (relatively) random sized rocks - a uniform probability distribution for the different rock sizes. I stumbled over my inability to measure single rocks. When I first thought about it, I also realized that an excessive number of small flat rocks could be a signal for field clearing. Just now, I heard another one: that the collection of piles making up a field clearing pile "site" is itself a mess: piles of different shapes, piles of different sizes, piles on top of each other, piles with large, medium, or small rocks. It is not hard to see when a site is from field clearing.

Quartz tools in glacial sands - what do they mean?

[Not rock pile related] 

I was driving around the "Head of the Bay" in Bourne, at the top of Buzzard's Bay. It occurred to me that where they dug the Cape Cod Canal, from the north to the south side of the cape, there was a natural series of lakes and waterways that did some of the job. 

This route followed by today's canal was probably a travel corridor in pre-history. In fact, as I was driving around on Bournedale Rd there was a sign saying it was an "Ancient Way" and that I should drive carefully. [Not sure if reckless driving is a threat to the archaeological record or to the mood.] 

Since they found lots of arrowheads at the southern end of this corridor, near the Aptucxet Trading Post in Bourne, I figured a good place to hunt plowed fields would be up at the Head of the Bay. Well, there were a few places visible from the aerial photos but they were either all grown over, or fenced in as part of very private farms. But as I drove back and forth checking several different places, I passed a cranberry bog several times (the one with three conspicuous windmills, that you see from Rt 495) and, eventually, thought I could spend some time looking around the edges of the bog - where they had been bulldozing not too long ago. I mean, if an ancient site is going to show up anywhere near here, it is most likely to show up in a cross section that really goes down into the glacial sands.  

After looking around the edges of the bog, I was wandering around random piles of dirt and saw this:

Just what I was hoping for! I pulled it out but it turned out to be a broken piece of something larger. I thought this was part of an axe. In the picture, the tip is pointing down and the break is facing up:

Here it is from in back, with the tip facing up:

It is a nice piece of quartz and it would have been a nice stone tool. What they call a "heartbreaker" on YouTube.

But wait! Maybe the break is in the lower left of the previous picture and the lower right of this picture:

That is a bit more like an arrowhead.

So maybe, if you are willing to spend an hour walking around newly bulldozed sand in a cranberry bog, you might find - at least - a broken quartz stone tool. It could be any age. But just because the sand is being mixed up by the bulldozer doesn't mean the find is not more or less in situ. Meaning it really is what it is: a stone tool in the glacial sand. 

Did it start out on the surface or was it some depth in the sand? Well, I am not an expert but there are a couple clues. One: no weathering. Two: bits of orange (iron?) stain that have migrated into the superficial cracks on the surface of the quartz. 

The long and the short of it is that this is not a completely crazy arrowhead hunting strategy. I have been eyeing some new bulldozing going on at the cranberry bogs along the Coonemessett River in Falmouth. Arrowheads are cool (and certainly what I am hoping to find) but a little bird is telling me that there could be a deeper story.

Aerial Archeology - California Hight Desert

Along CA 168 near "Gilbert Pass" southwest of Fish Lake Valley at the north end of Deep Springs Valley.

What the heck is that circle?

The road map:

Cool!

Adena earthwork/rock pile - Ohio

Get's interesting around 20 minutes in.

Ancient Adena Ruins Found and More - YouTube

Another Serpent Surprise (Nonnewaug CT Cluster #3)

 While walking to the mailbox, I had another Serpent Surprise...

"Symbolic and decorative modes of communication" 

https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2022/12/driveway-surprise-serpent-nonnewaug-ct.html

A Dam Serpent Surprise (Watertown CT)

 Can you spot the Indigenous Iconography in this photo? 

More here: https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2022/12/a-dam-serpent-surprise-watertown-ct.html