Teach me how to find spear/arrow heads

[Bill J.]

What a great thread. Thanks for lesson guys!!
BillJ
:thumbsup:

 

[2172]

found only one in my whole life. Deer season, 3 years ago, I was sitting on the edge of a field, back against a tree, at the head of a deer run...had seen spooked deer run up the run a couple of times. Looked down and saw a piece of quartz, and picked it up, thinking it'd be interesting to try it as a "flint"....it was a perfect arrow head. I realized it was in the edge of a totally rotted stump (the stump was of a tree that was 5' in diameter)...the stump had probably been logged off close to the turn of the 20th century, and the arrow head was from a missed shot at a deer...no idea of when it had been fired, but it doesn't match any heads in the Cherokee museum....I'm guessing it
was fired somewhere in the early 1800's....Hank

 

Good thread - I have enjoyed finding points since I was a kid. In this part of the country, you can sometimes still find the remains of campsites or piles of flakes near rivers and other choice locations. In fact, there are more than a few caves with burn marks still evident from campfires, which is something I have not seen mentioned yet. Caves or overhangs were natural shelter and are a prime spot for artifacts. My dad rafted down a portion of the Rio Grande in the 1940's and found buckets of points and other tools. However, a large portion of these (and also ones I have found in my wanderings) are dart or atlatl points.

Arrowheads are pretty small and delicate so are hard to see plus they won't take any abuse. I imagine many of these broke when an animal was hit. Dart and spear points are much more numerous with scrapers and other tools behind. At one time, I had one hatchet head that was an oval about 3x6 with all sides sharpened and a scraper that was a perfect fit for a hand. It had a natural smooth swell that fit the palm and a flat chipped edge - sort of like a large hoe blade. The best one I still have is a complete and unbroken piece that looks like a single edged knife blade - curved on one side and flat on the other. Having knapped flint before, this one impresses me as a work of art by a good craftsman.

Also be on the lookout for other items. We found pottery shards on occasion and seashells that were drilled to accept a cord. The cord was long gone but the shells were still in good shape.

 

[olgriz]

You guys have come up with some really good advice and there isn't much that I can add that will help. Out here in the west it's now illegal to pick up any artifact that's over 50 years old if it's on federal land, which is one huge part of the west. There was a guy here in Oregon busted and fined for picking up bottles out of a old WWII dump. So watch your back if you are looking on public land. That said, I still might have a hint or two that you can use. In dry country any water source is a place to look for a camp site. In the great basin look along what are now dry streams and ancient lake shores, especially where the now dry stream entered the lake. You will usually find a camp close by there. In areas where they camped in the same places over many years, look for a change in the soil. Black sooty soil can be the carbon soot left from thousands of camp fires and is a good indication of where to look. Last but not least, look for shape and turn over or pick up every thing you find that looks like it might be one or part of one, but most importantly, get an eye for spotting any small piece of stone that has had flakes removed. The areas on the point that come from the flakes being removed in shaping the stone will stand out and holler "here I am". That's why looking after a rain works so well. Light hitting on the different angles cause the point to really stand out. Once you find a couple you will start getting an eye for it.

 

[buckknife]

strider thats some real good info :applause:.Makes me want to go look this weekend :thumbsupo you have a good web site in mind that we could learn some more about this?

 

[aragorn]

Smokeydays, that's a great story, and I hope I can do the same for my 5 year old daughter one day. But those points you found could have been luck, not your Dad! The beautiful Archaic point I found when I was 14 happened when a friend and I were scoping out an abandoned farm looking for old bottles, he said 'wouldn't it be great to find an arrowhead', I looked down and there it was. A couple of years later he and I were digging for bottles in another old farmhouse dump and, incredibly, began finding flints - no chippings or flakes, just about 20 intact points and tools, some of them buried above the 19th century stuff. Eventually we realised they must have been finds made by the farmer in his fields and then thrown out, maybe in a house clearance. About twenty years later my parents bought the place I now spend a lot of my time in, a 100-acre farm, and when I first saw it I thought the only thing needed to make it perfect would be an Indian site - and then on the first spring plowing I found one!

Birdwatcher, I understand how you feel. I always used to feel that way when I was involved in the excavation of burials in Britain - the 'forensic' information gained from, for example, the skeleton of a medieval peasant never seemed to justify violating the burial, especially when you saw the bones later shoved in a cardboard box in a museum store. In the case of the stuff we've been talking about, I'd never take material from a site that was clearly undisturbed - where there was still lots of information in the association of materials, or the possibility of, say pollen or grain survival that really demanded detailed excavation. But most of us find flints in disturbed plowsoil and don't dig for them, so if anything serve archaeology by actually discovering sites which might later be excavated - that is, if you want to risk reporting them and encounter another version of the police state bureaucracy familiar to gun enthusiasts, sometimes resulting in landowners losing most rights on their own land if a site is identified. But that's another story!

 

[KyFlintlock]

Here was one of my better ones that didn't make the trip to school that day:

I'm sure some of y'all have some incredible collections, show us some, if you have time.....

 

[Huntinfool]

Birdwatcher said, "If I did find one though I expect I'd just admire it for a bit and put it back where it lay, doesn't seem right to me to move 'em somehow."

I understand your reverance my friend but the way I look at it is I'm saving them from the plow and disc!

YMH&OS, :redthumb:
Chuck

 

[76monza]

Cowhand,
I had a friend that lived around La Juanta, Colorado. and he used to go out in the desert to hunt artifacts. Looking for artifacts in those conditions is quite a bit different from areas where theres more precipitation. From what he told me you look for the points exposed by wind erosion mostly. Saw a few pictures of some points lying in undisturbed position raised up from the ground by just a fraction of an inch but fully exposed or mostly exposed, lying on what looks like a pedestal. Never find them like that here in Kansas!
Smokeydays

 

[aragorn]

KyFlintlock, does that have fluting? I can't see it on this side, but maybe on the back - sometimes only one side was fluted. Usually it extends at least half way up from the base and is the result of one flake being expertly struck off.
Beautiful find!

 

[olgriz]

Cowhand,
Saw a few pictures of some points lying in undisturbed position raised up from the ground by just a fraction of an inch but fully exposed or mostly exposed, lying on what looks like a pedestal. Smokeydays

I worked for a cow outfit in Nevada, and I've found points sitting on pedestals almost an inch off the ground. In that part of the desert there wasn't a rock big enough to kill a rattle snake. I found some good ones there, and they were all on private property so I got to keep 'em. Like you say, they usually are fully exposed by either wind or rain. I think that's probably why I let off that job. Spent all my time looking at the ground instead of looking at the cows. The pictures are of ones I found on this ranch. It was 8000 acres of deeded land along the river, and it seemed like anywhere you went on there you could find artifacts.

Most of these I found while horseback -- looking at the ground instead of doing what I was being paid for. The one long one in the top middle my horse stepped on. On the top left are either drills or perhaps awls for sewing. Both of these were found close together, and on little pillars of sand after about a 5 minute hard rain. Bottom two on the left are probably knives, and the rest on the bottom are stones that have been worked and were interesting to me, so I included them in my display.
The next frame are beads I found when I was a young kid. We lived in Calif. during WWII, and when the war started the army had troops at the coast. One of the things that I thought was really dumb when I was a young kid was the wooden cannon pointing out to sea. Anyhow, my dad worked at Avila Beach, and the army dug in around there. One of the spots that they had a foxhole dug and sand bagged and all set up for kids to play in was right in the middle of a shell mound. Silty sooty black dirt and zillions of shells. Well when the army left what are 7 or 8 year old boys going to do but play war in the foxhole. Every time we went there I found a few beads and brought them home, and my mom saved them for me. So here they are. A year or so ago my Aunt turned 90 and we were down there for her birthday, and I couldn't wait to go back and see if I could find a few more beads. They had widened the road, and it's now gone forever. Times they are a changing.

 

[76monza]

Cowhand,
Nice pics of the relics, if I can figure how to get these photos onto the site I'll Post a couple of mine pieces I've collected.

i've got a couple of pieces to be honest I'm not sure what they are but someone spent a lot of time polishing on them. It appears to be some dark, almost blood red stone that's been ground and polished flat on one face and the back side was left half round. I don't think it's catlinite(?) maybe jasper? I will post a picture of it along with a very unusal shaped scraper out of pink flint.

Smokeydays

 

[KyFlintlock]

Strider, No fluting on that piece, both sides are straight.

cowhand - Great collection, you have me twisting in my chair. That is something that can be passed down for generations to come..

 

[brushbuster]

here are some or the arrow heads in my collection,notice the fish hook behind the stockings

 

[pepperbelly]

I found some once way back in the early '70s using a technique I haven't read here.
Dad and I started scuba diving in '68 when I was 10 years old, but usually I just snorkeled since I could hold my breath over 2.5 minutes. One weekend we were in San Marcos diving in the river. The river there in town has a rocky clean bottom. I found a bunch of arrowheads, especially bird points on the bottom of that river under an old tree.
We gave them to a professor at the college there. I wish I had held on to some of them, but I was 14, and it was spring break and the college girls wore this thing called a bikini. Did I mention I could stay underwater over 2 minutes? :thumbsup:
Jim

 

[BigCity]

Cowhand,
nice collection. The second one from the top looks more like a shark tooth than an arrowhead though. :hmm:

 

[Wanders]

One of the reasons that old farm junkpile might be a good source of Native American artifcts is that farmers used to find a lot of them. In the southern Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri area the common term for these artifacts was "Indian Rocks". They weren't always considered a thing of value. A feller told me how when he was young, his scoutmaster told the troop to find two arrowheads and strike them together to make sparks to start a fire! I used to go to a lot of farm auctions when I lived in S. Illinois a few years ago, and almost every auction had some "Indian Rocks". I would imagine there were farmers who picked them up as they plowed, brought them home to show the wife & kids, and then tossed them in the junk pile. That's just speculation, but I'll bet there's some truth there.
Bill :thumbsup:

 

[aragorn]

Wanders, that's fascinating, and makes a lot of sense of my finds.

In Europe when flint hand axes, etc were found by farmers two hundred or more years ago they used to think they were 'thunderbolts', before anyone had any idea that they might have been made by humans.

 

[buckknife]

Well this thread has got me excited enough to go look in a creek that has turned up a few points and a axe so far over the last couple years.Its been fairly warm here for the last week,highs in the 40s.most all the snow has melted away,except for the creeks i found out are still covered with thick ice.We did manage to find a few rock piles and i pounded on some different chert an quartz rocks.Broke a piece of my hammer head on one of them.we looked in a small feeder creek on the way back to the truck,and there it laid a axe.Its in good shape.Its not a real big one,probably one used close to camp for chopen.Gonna have to check this feeder creek out much closer when the weather warms up some time.Wish i had a scanner but mines broke.Ive seen much better looken axes but to my son and i it was a good find.

 

[aragorn]

Sorry to have taken a while to get back to you on this. An excellent website is produced by the London (Ontario) chapter of the Ontario Archaeological Society. It's an amateur society but one of the main guys behind it is a prof at the University of Western Ontario who is one of Canada's leading prehistorians, so the site has a lot of authority. They have a really good summary with simple illustrations of projectile points at www.ssc.uwo.ca/assoc/oas/points/sopoints.html. The sequence is for Ontario, but a lot of it is common to the whole continent. At the bottom of the page are about 20 links to other websites giving sequences across all of Canada and the US. Some of these are really excellent, and might give you clues to your local area (The site dates from 2001 and I've just noticed that a few of the links are dead, but most of them are museum or university sites that have probably changed their servers so could be found easily again by doing a web search).
Good luck!