2 posts tagged “artifacts”

As I was looking for a way to put a subtitle on my blog title, I noticed a little ad at the bottom of my blog page:

Now, I know that plenty of websites have advertising banners and whatnot that they use to make money and keep the site going.  Fine.  Those ads may be targeted to a specific audience that is presumably accessing that website.  Fine.  But I find this ad somewhat offensive, since the market in arrowheads and other collectibles supports pothunting, which is in some cases illegal and in other cases merely robs us of the ability to learn about our past, both prehistoric and historic.  It reminds me of when I was a teenager and a devotee of Sassy magazine.  There was a several-page article about self-esteem and healthy body images, and near the end of the article there was a full-page ad for some teen-directed weight-loss gimmick.  They got lots of mail from their readers, and the editor's response was that she did not have control over who advertised in the magazine.  That's how I feel right now too.

Here is the scoop on buying arrowheads online: if there is an archaeological or historical site on private property, then the property owner can do whatever they want with the artifacts they find there.  However, as soon as you remove artifacts from a site, we lose some information about it, unless you keep track of exactly where each and every artifact came from.  There are thousands of sites on public land that are protected by the various agencies that manage those lands, but pothunters will raid known sites, dig into mounds for artifacts, and then sell them, because people who, I would assume don't know better for the most part, think they're cool. 

When archaeologists dig, they dig as little of a site as possible and they keep detailed records of everything they find.  We tend to dig 1x1 meter squares, and we dig in 10 cm levels so that we have a 3D record of artifact locations.  If we find something like a pot or a hearth, we map in exactly where in that square meter it was found.  Any artifacts we collect go into museums and storage facilities in the hopes that someone will be able to use them for scientific or public educational purposes.  If we find human remains, we treat them with dignity and respect, and follow federal guidelines that involve contacting the tribe that is designated as the Most Likely Descendent so that they can help guide us in appropriate treatment of their ancestor's remains.  Pothunters will dig through burials and desecrate the remains they find, because all they care about is the money they can make from the offerings that were carefully buried with someone's mother or grandfather or child hundreds or thousands of years ago.

I know, some people don't care about prehistoric Indian villages when they need a house or a freeway or money to feed their kids today.  Some people don't see the value in preserving the past, or in knowing where people gathered acorns or hunted deer throusands of years ago, or where Chinese immigrants were mining in the 1880s, or where sheepherders camped in the 1940s.  But a lot of us do, so much so that preserving archaeological and historical sites is written into federal law hand-in-hand with preserving our environment.  And, to me, helping Native American tribes preserve their past and the dignity of their ancestors is a major motivation for doing what I do.  So, please, don't go buy arrowheads on EBay.  If you can find modern ones that are being made today by flintknappers, buy one of them.  They are equally amazing, perhaps more so in this day and age, even if they aren't old.  And you are helping to preserve a technology and a tradition that ties us to our distant past, instead of robbing someone else of their history. 

Ruby pano 2

We had a good day today.  We covered part of the line that we weren't able to access before, which was a good hard hike, but then we did a bunch of road scouting and we got up to this ridgetop, where we could look down on everything.

But I thought I'd show you some of the artifacts we've collected recently too.  I know that people like projectile points the best, so here are some of the points we have found recently:

Elko base frag

NSN frag

Most of the points we find are broken, and for a good reason.  Much of the time, when we find a lithic scatter (chipped stone lying around) we will find broken points nearby.  That's because someone took the broken point out of its hafting and re-used the arrow or spear shaft for a new point.  What we are seeing is the broken, old point and the flakes left behind from someone making a new point.  I think it's pretty cool.

You'll notice that both of these points are made from something other than obsidian -- we are in an area that's  between obsidian sources, but there are good chert sources nearby, so the majority of the tools are made from chert.  It comes in an amazing variety of colors and patterns:

DSCN0485

I found all of these colors within a 10 meter area on one site!  It's actually one of the most fascinating parts of this project -- seeing how the vegetation, the topography, and the toolstone changes as we move across the state.  Knowing where the obsidian and chert comes form can tell us about how people moved around, or who they traded with, since an obsidian projectile point that is found a long way from its source must have gotten there somehow.  We are also seeing a lot of what we simply call bifaces -- basically, they are roughly-shaped pieces of stone, projectile point "blanks" that were traded from place to place.  Someone would shape the chert into a large, thick oval and then trade it that way, so that the person who got the stone could make their favorite type of point from it later.  A lot of the time, these blanks break as they are being made into a point, so we tend to find broken bits of them in with the lithic scatters.  It's another clue to what people were doing at the places we now call sites.

Ruby pano 1