arrowheads/indian artifacts

[northwoods1]

Anybody ever find one?

[Mooseherder]

Here's one from a couple years ago.
http://www.forestryforum.com/board/index.php/topic,32715.0.html

[jim king]

Yes , not far from you in northern Wisconsin  when I was a kid and picking rock from feilds the  we found a large stone ax that was then used as a doorstop in the house and several small arrow heads.

Here in the Amazon there is an Island called fossil island that every Sept thru Oct is out of the river a little due to the anual river drop and there we have found a tiny carved knife made from bone .  The handle portion was about three inches long and with a nice
design on it, it is somewhere in a box in my brothers machine shed at Turtle Lake.  Also found were small clay pot peices and thousands of bones..

We also have a site here where we found man made dikes and channels for holding irrigation water in an area where there were farms thousands of years ago.

In Nigera we found small stone figures of what must have been a religous symbol from the Nok culture .

[Qweaver]

My dad would roam the plowed fields around our house in the spring.  He had a pretty good collection of arrowheads.  I'm a little amazed that he was able to find so many heads with just a random search of a plowed field.  There must have been quite a large Indian population living around here at some time.

[Banjo picker]

 



My youngest son Bobby found this on our place one day...He was driving the Kubota rtv while I was spraying weeds in the pasture ,as we were going up a hill he stopped the machine as said "Look at that"....I could see just a small part of it sticking out of the dirt, and thought to myself ...Its got to be broke....I have been up and down there countless times with stuff even the dozer...but no it wasn't ....Its as good of an arrowhead as I have ever held in my hand...There were no pieces or anything there...I think it was either just lost or shot and lost....Tim

[Magicman]

I have several buckets of arrowheads and have just never gotten around to displaying them.     Since I now have a tree farm instead of a tilled farm, I guess the arrowhead finding days are over.

[paul case]

my folks have serveral(a couple of handfuls)of them we found on the creek on our property. im too old and cant see good enough to find many i guess.  pc

[northwoods1]

I guess I should start reading the past posts    I was kind of figuring some of you guys would know about this stuff, that is great. I could talk most anyones ear off a lot of the time about things I've found and stuff I've seen others find. Its all interesting to me
banjopicker that is a dandy! I know lots of guys who look there entire lives and never find one that good. Where are you at that looks like what is called a Pine Tree point. Most likely it was a knife I would say.
Qweaver my dad did the same thing he had a lot of them which he found on the farm, he cleared a lot of the land and tilled 40 acres near Green Bay, WI. It was ideal country for people to be in ever since man has roamed these lands, with the bay being there and a number of large rivers flowing in to it. A lot of places you would find where people has set up camp in the same place say overlooking a river, even 10s of thousands of years of repeated use. Even though the stone is all that remains it all adds up.
Jim I am wondering where approx. did you live in northern WI? Why do they call that island you mentioned fossil island? I've got some bone knives made out of bison bones from a prehistoric arikara site in South Dakota. They mostly consumed buffalo and outside the camp there where refuse piles of bones 20' deep. Even so all the bones were gone over and all the useable flat portions of certain bones like shoulder blades were cut out for use as points, the ulna or leg bones used for scrapers or knives, knive handles. Nothing went to waste they were definitely making he best use of buffalo possible

[northwoods1]

I have several buckets of arrowheads and have just never gotten around to displaying them.     Since I now have a tree farm instead of a tilled farm, I guess the arrowhead finding days are over.

several buckets hmmm, if you need help sorting them out let me know

[northwoods1]

my folks have serveral(a couple of handfuls)of them we found on the creek on our property. im too old and cant see good enough to find many i guess.  pc

you know what it is I think Paul? You have to be thinking about finding one almost or you can look right at it and not see it.

[jim king]

northwoods1:

I grew up half a mile east of Turtle Lake on Hwy 8 and when I turned 17 left to see the world.  I still have a farm East of Balsam Lake that we bought from my wifes father with the Apple River flowing thru it and that is where my son and his family live.

Fossil  Island is just east of the Colombian / Brazilian border about half an hour by speedboat and it is called Fossil Island because the whole thing is gravel and fossiles and gold dust.  The streets in Leticia , Colombia and Tabatinga , Brazil are made using the gravel and fossils for agregate.

[Banjo picker]

banjopicker that is a dandy! I know lots of guys who look there entire lives and never find one that good. Where are you at that looks like what is called a Pine Tree point. Most likely it was a knife I would say.

I am in NE Miss..I am told the material is called Arkansas Rose....It certianly is not from around here...If you look close you can see the pinkish hint to it...That tells us that rocks were transported and traded between tribes...as to the type of point ...I don't know...Bobby probably knows he is the one that has the books on them and the eye to find them...He picked up a nice piece one day and I had been in the same exact spot the day before...Not much fun to hunt with him....

Tim

[WDH]

I got pretty good at finding them.  I also studied them and learned a lot about how the shapes and styles evolved over time.  Tim, that point you have is in the range of 7000 - 9000 years old.  It is a corner notched point of the Kirk variety.  I have also heard them referred to as  Pine Tree points.

I have collected avidly, more so in my younger days when we still sheared and raked forestry sites for replanting.  The root raking was the best thing ever for a projectile point hunter.  Winter wheat fields were also very good.  Once you learned how to recognize the types of sites that the natives like to occupy, you could get pretty good at knowing where the points would be on a large tract if they were there at all.  So, I spent more time looking for projectile point sites than I did looking for the points themselves many times.  Once the site was located, then the real hunting began.  I have about 3000, but many are broken or damaged.  But, I have 600 or so that are in great condition. 

Along with points, there were tools, which I find to be really cool.  And pottery.

[northwoods1]

Winter wheat fields were also very good.  Once you learned how to recognize the types of sites that the natives like to occupy, you could get pretty good at knowing where the points would be on a large tract if they were there at all.  

I have a friend that lives in Denver and every time I visit we go out and hit the wheat fields around there. The wind blows and stuff just keeps getting uncovered, almost everywhere along the front of the range has material to be found including the best type of stuff. My friend took the neighbor kid out and 1st time looking for artifacts he picked up a folsom .
That is what I like about looking for artifacts, being able to figure out where you might find a piece of stone that someone left thousands of years ago can be quite a feat. The land has changed so much in places and you begin to see and understand just how much. I think it helps a person have a good perspective of just how temporary the world is as we see it now. Here I can go out and look for points on my farm that a person was using to hunt elephants (mastodon) and the entire flora & fauna of that time was totally different than now. Time changed all that its amazing.

[WDH]

My friend took the neighbor kid out and 1st time looking for artifacts he picked up a folsom .

Down here, that type of find would be a clovis which is the eastern style similar to folsom.  Unfortunately, I have never found one  .  That is like going deer hunting for the first time and harvesting the world record buck in the first 5 minutes of the hunt.

[whitepe]

I have never found any myself but my father in-law has found several over the years on his farm which borders the wabash river.  He found more when he used moldboard plows but after switching to no-till his find rate dropped off. He has also found axe heads.   My late uncle, Lawrence White, used to own a farm which bordered the entire west side of what known as Hawk Lake a.k.a. Lost Lake.  His wife's maiden name was Hawk and the farm was her father's at one time.  Hawk Lake is about 0.5 miles south west of Lake Maxinkuckee in Culver, Indiana. Lake Maxinkuckee is the 2nd largest natural lake in Indiana.  My Uncle found numerous arrowheads and artifacts over the years, enough to fill an large bookcase.  But many years ago, while they wintered in Florida, Someone broke into his Indiana house and stole the display case with it's contents.  Since they have passed away, the house and farm were sold many years ago.  

[northwoods1]

My friend took the neighbor kid out and 1st time looking for artifacts he picked up a folsom .

Down here, that type of find would be a clovis which is the eastern style similar to folsom.  Unfortunately, I have never found one  .  That is like going deer hunting for the first time and harvesting the world record buck in the first 5 minutes of the hunt.

That is about exactly what it is like a folsom is a real rarity there was only relatively short time from in which those people where roaming around hunting bison, to find any evidence of there existence like that is harder than looking for a needle in a haystack.
I've found pieces of clovis before I can show you pics if you want. Pieces of what was some very nice ones. Then I found a real oddity at my farm this year as I was clearing back the edge of a field along the edge of my driveway. You wouldn't believe it but it is the truth, took me a while to figure out what I had even though when I 1st picked it up I knew it was something, just couldn't figure it out for many months. It is a part of a crystal quart clovis point. The person had it completely made and had the base prepared for fluting. You can see just where he set the tool on the base which he struck to try and drive the flute off, but in this case the entire back of the point broke off. So I have the base of a crystal quartz clovis that was broken in the knapping process the guy MUST have been upset when he struck that last blow!

[Magicman]

several buckets hmmm, if you need help sorting them out let me know  

Here's one that was easy to get to.  I didn't dig down because I was in a hurry getting out Christmas decorations.
 


Some that were on top.
 


Kinda out of focus, but it was dark in the attic.

I know some guys that used them for skipping rocks when they were playing at the creek when they were kids.   

[northwoods1]

magicman you have a real treasure trove there if I was you the 1st thing I would do is go through that bucket and carefully pick out all the ones that look the nicest and undamaged. Keep those out of the bucket so they don't rub together or can't get broken. I had the same type of arrangment for a long time and "finally!" I got some frames and put all my stuff in them. Just think those pieces of yours are thousands of years old... most look like there of similar material so maybe there from the same area one person found most of them. I see some nice ones in there!

[Magicman]

So much that I need to do.  I found all of these myself and they would look nice hanging on my cabin wall.  All of the fields that these came from are now planted with trees.

I have a couple of friends that have 5 gallon buckets of them.