Monday, June 16, 2014

May 24 finds

     Well, I have fallen behind in posting my finds again. I have been getting out there and finding stuff in my free time but I just haven't had a chance to sit down and type up a post and now I have a bunch of stuff to show. Rather than put everything in one big post I am going to break this up and show a few finds at a time and hopefully by the end of this week I can be all caught up.
     May 24 was a lucky day for me. It had rained quite a bit in the preceding days and it was a nice cludy day, bright overcast, perfect for searching for arrowheads. I drove to a favorite place and found plenty of freshly disturbed earth where I could look. There was a large area that had been very recently stirred up and then rained on, and a narrow strip that had been moved around some time ago and gotten a lot more rain. I searched the whole big area but these finds were in the narrow strip that had been rained on a lot. It takes a ton of rain to really wash off all the rocks on a fresh surface.
     This was fun to spot. A quartz point, just missing the tip. This is the shape variously called small stemmed, Wading River or Squibnocket Stemmed.
     Not whole, but still pretty. This is in a place where I mostly find triangular arrowheads and it is nice to find a stemmed form in that place from time to time.
     A few feet away I bent down to pick up a tiny piece of quartz barely protruding from the soil. 98 percent of the time this will just be another chip or flake, other times just a natural piece of quartz, sometimes I get lucky and it is something like this...
     It is a Squibnocket Triangle and it is pristine and nicely flaked. I find a few crude examples for every finely made one like this. It had been a while since I found a nice whole arrowhead, I am very happy with this pretty little gem and feel lucky to have found it.
     My friend Dave came and met me out there and we drove to check out some other spots. We went to a place that has been a grassy meadow as long as I can remember, now being ripped up. It was nice and sandy but the conditions were terrible with few rocks visible and the walking was strenuous in the heaps of dusty sand. After a few minutes, Dave was in the middle of saying "Let's go, there is nothing here to find" when he spotted this diamond in the dust. Some damage to the base but still a nice find. This is at least the second time Dave has found an arrowhead while in the middle of proclaiming there was no chance of finding anything. Not only that but in the weeks since I have searched that place more thoroughly and not found one more thing!
     Dave really has some luck. In a different place, earlier this spring, he was metal detecting near a riverbank when he found a target. He stuck a shovel into the ground and pulled out a plug of sod and this monster popped out of the ground!
     That's a Mansion Inn blade, broken at the base but look at the size of that thing! Incredible find. The target he detected was a piece of 20th century trash that was actually underneath this huge artifact, obviously this place had been disturbed in the past, I assume by farming activities.

1 comment :

pwax said...

As usual: wow!