Arrowhead Hunting

[NotActuallyALonghorn 4974]

A few weeks ago I was hiking up a "mountain" in central Mexico to get to a cave halfway up it. There was no trail, so we were blazing our own path through the scrub. I happened to look down at just the right spot and spotted a shard of obsidian. There is no local obsidian in that area, so somebody must have traded for jmit back in the day 

[NorthLoop 14180]

There was probably a letter from Red underneath it. 

[MalibuSheriff 1090]

Not arrowhead but found this cool fossil imprint yesterday in a gravel bar below Grand Lake dam:

You guys have all types of places for petrified wood all over central Texas.  This one was from a creek near my in-laws’ old ranch in Hamilton County:

Their neighbor up the road had an entire huge fireplace made out of petrified wood.  It was stunning, almost museum worthy pieces that he’d found around Hamilton and some creek over by Priddy or Gustine.

My uncle and his neighbor buddy both had farms just south of Ponca City, OK and on days off they would walk the sandbars of the Arkansas and Salt Fork Rivers collecting arrowheads, fossils, and other cool things - including a Pleistocene bison skull (one with the huge horns that angled out versus curved horns like modern bison) and several huge spear points.  His buddy’s collection was spread through his barn and was amazing.  I always wondered what happened to his collection after he passed away…  Those two dudes were incredibly interesting people.  They always had a good story or knew some arcane bit of local history.

Edited January 30, 2023 by MalibuSheriff

[Armybrat 40814]

From around Monterrey and Austin areas.

 

[texastough 1129]

Few more recent ones, Travis Co

[texastough 1129]

[texastough 1129]

On 4/12/2021 at 6:23 PM, CHIEF said:

I pretty much knew where to find them, they just removed any doubt. I'm gonna do some digging on the flat area above a spring on my small acreage. There are several waterfalls before it dumps into the Brazos. I'm going to screen all of the sediment in each of the pools below the falls and see what I come up with as well.

CHIEF

Did you ever dig by the spring? Thats how I find most of the Travis county artifacts posted above. Found a camp on top of a little bluff overlooking the Colorado River bottoms, with a spring down the hill about 100 yards away. 

Edited February 10, 2023 by texastough

[Armybrat 40814]

The hillside between Sunnyvale Street and Elmhurst Drive in southeast Austin was littered with lots of arrowheads & spearpoints in 1959 when my parents moved into their new home on the latter. The houses on the former were not built yet, so we could scavenge around on the low hillside with no problems. That’s where we found many of those points in my photo. All were on the surface.

There used to be a ravine running below those back yards and possibly a small spring once flowed through before it was mostly filled in by the developer. 

 

[CHIEF 5075]

1 hour ago, texastough said:

Did you ever dig by the spring? Thats how I find most of the Travis county artifacts posted above. Found a camp on top of a little bluff overlooking the Colorado River bottoms, with a spring down the hill about 100 yards away. 

I dug some with my skid steer to see if anything showed up. So far it has been zilch. I'm thinking about building a stock tank on the draw and have the spring in the center. I imagine something may come up from down deep.

CHIEF

[texastough 1129]

41 minutes ago, CHIEF said:

I dug some with my skid steer to see if anything showed up. So far it has been zilch. I'm thinking about building a stock tank on the draw and have the spring in the center. I imagine something may come up from down deep.

CHIEF

Another way to hunt is to clear the vegetation off a little area (for instance, with Roundup and then come back later and rake/tear the dead stuff out) and let the wind and rain work on the bare dirt for a while. If there's a spot with a good view above the spring thats where I'd start. 

I found the camp I've been digging just by seeing enough flakes on top to be suspicious. Digging turns up lots of flake, bones, big clam shell, fire rock, and some nice artifacts. The highest concentration is about a foot down. About 2-2.5 feet down, the black topsoil (mixed with rock/gravel) gives way to only clay/gravel/rock/sand and thats where the flake and everything else stops. I think depth totally depends on the location, because some areas lose soil, some build up soil, and in others the soil moves around (sand drifts etc). Also, every time an animal digs a hole or a tree goes down with root ball intact, some of the dirt a couple feet down gets put back on top -- and over thousands of years that can lead to a lot of turnover/mixing in certain areas. 

Edited February 10, 2023 by texastough

[horn4life 3759]

2 hours ago, Armybrat said:

The hillside between Sunnyvale Street and Elmhurst Drive in southeast Austin was littered with lots of arrowheads & spearpoints in 1959 when my parents moved into their new home on the latter. The houses on the former were not built yet, so we could scavenge around on the low hillside with no problems. That’s where we found many of those points in my photo. All were on the surface.

There used to be a ravine running below those back yards and possibly a small spring once flowed through before it was mostly filled in by the developer. 

 

Ha- I used to own a condo in Sunnyvale Villas just up the street.  

[Armybrat 40814]

17 minutes ago, horn4life said:

Ha- I used to own a condo in Sunnyvale Villas just up the street.  

Heh, 60+ years ago that property on Summit was about an acre and a half lot with an old shack on it owned by my mom’s ironing lady. 
That old lady was straight out of redneck/hillbillyville - she was barefoot most of the time when I went by there to pick up our ironing, plus she chewed snuff and could spit with the best of them. Her husband was not ambulatory and laid on a bed in their tiny living room.

Sometime in the mid- late 1960s a developer bought the place and built those apartments. 
The old lady was paid enough to buy a little halfway decent 2 bedroom cottage on Holly Street north of Town Lake.

I took this pic in the summer of 1959 about 1 block from there.

 

Edited February 10, 2023 by Armybrat

[horn4life 3759]

1 hour ago, Armybrat said:

Heh, 60+ years ago that property on Summit was about an acre and a half lot with an old shack on it owned by my mom’s ironing lady. 
That old lady was straight out of redneck/hillbillyville - she was barefoot most of the time when I went by there to pick up our ironing, plus she chewed snuff and could spit with the best of them. Her husband was not ambulatory and laid on a bed in their tiny living room.

Sometime in the mid- late 1960s a developer bought the place and built those apartments. 
The old lady was paid enough to buy a little halfway decent 2 bedroom cottage on Holly Street north of Town Lake.

I took this pic in the summer of 1959 about 1 block from there.

 

Spent a winter evening when it snowed back in the early 80's pushing folks on the freeway out of an icy patch in a low spot on 1-35 hidden by the guardrail.  

Now confess are these cabinets ones you stained yourself from Lowes?  They look just like my olds ones and were very similar in color as well, I think the stain was shaded bark.

Edited February 10, 2023 by horn4life

[Armybrat 40814]

Pre finished from HD.

Son demo’d the original half wall and replaced it with what you see in the pic. Wife wanted storage space for more of her tableware stuff and a counter to serve as a buffet line in the dining area.

 

[NotActuallyALonghorn 4974]

5 hours ago, texastough said:

Another way to hunt is to clear the vegetation off a little area (for instance, with Roundup and then come back later and rake/tear the dead stuff out) and let the wind and rain work on the bare dirt for a while. If there's a spot with a good view above the spring thats where I'd start. 

I found the camp I've been digging just by seeing enough flakes on top to be suspicious. Digging turns up lots of flake, bones, big clam shell, fire rock, and some nice artifacts. The highest concentration is about a foot down. About 2-2.5 feet down, the black topsoil (mixed with rock/gravel) gives way to only clay/gravel/rock/sand and thats where the flake and everything else stops. I think depth totally depends on the location, because some areas lose soil, some build up soil, and in others the soil moves around (sand drifts etc). Also, every time an animal digs a hole or a tree goes down with root ball intact, some of the dirt a couple feet down gets put back on top -- and over thousands of years that can lead to a lot of turnover/mixing in certain areas. 

We have some springs on our property that feed into a creek named "Indian Creek," but I've never found anything there. It's all East Texas sandy creek beds that are deep enough that the drilling company had to put in eight foot culverts to keep it from washing out, but I'm not sure I've even found a rock in there that wasn't washed off from the road. I guess maybe I need to make a screen and try shoveling.

[ImissWallyPryor 9046]

This thread reminded me of a federal crime fighting agent who patrolled the US Army Corps of Engineer land around Lake Oahe in SD back in the 2000s. It’s against Federal law to collect artifacts of any kind on COE land, and he would use binoculars to observe people walking the shorelines (usually fishing) and issue citations carrying stiff fines if they picked up anything, even fishing lures. Almost no one caught was aware that they were doing anything wrong. It became such a problem that our US Senators (Tom Daschle being one) wrote a letter to the Corps. The agent was transferred. Crime skyrocketed.

When I was a kid in the 60s, I would walk the shoreline during camping/fishing trips looking for spent .50 Cal casings left over from when they had fighter pilot training grounds in the area during WWII. For a grade schooler, finding those was cooler than anything.

I did find arrowheads and pieces of pottery in a plowed field on a friend’s farm, though. 

[Blotto 23484]

We were going through some boxes of our parents stuff and stumbled across three bags of arrowheads that they acquired when a relative passed. As she lived in New Mexico, presumably thats where these were collected. Probably 100+ arrowheads and a tool of some sort. Kind of cool, but I'd like to know more about what they are. Anybody know of a good site that makes it easy to identify by region? 

 

 

 

 

 

[Armybrat 40814]

4 hours ago, Blotto said:

We were going through some boxes of our parents stuff and stumbled across three bags of arrowheads that they acquired when a relative passed. As she lived in New Mexico, presumably thats where these were collected. Probably 100+ arrowheads and a tool of some sort. Kind of cool, but I'd like to know more about what they are. Anybody know of a good site that makes it easy to identify by region? 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is one place you can start…

https://www.projectilepoints.net/Search/Texas_Search.html

[NotActuallyALonghorn 4974]

It looks like there are more than a few tools there versus points. The ones with scalloped edges were probably used as cutting tools, most likely un-hafted by the looks of them. I'd guess they were used for cutting through meat and stuff. If you are trying to make jerky or some sort of dried meat, you need something that you can use to slice it thinly, and preferably across the grain. As sharp as knapped tools can be, the edge just isn't smooth enough to slice stuff like that like a modern knife can. The really long skinny ones were probably used as awls for punching holes in leather and stuff so that they could stitch things together. It looks like there are also more than a few tools that were likely used to scrape the flesh off of hides during the process of brain tanning them. All in all, it's a pretty cool spectrum of points and tools that would have been needed to do basic things before the introduction of iron and steel tools by Europeans. 

[Not a cat 5651]

Total newb here, but I was visiting my mother's place in Kyle and noticed a bunch of flakes on a hill on her property.  Found a few promising pieces on the surface, which look like they've been worked but certainly aren't the obvious symmetrically perfect arrowheads a lot of people are posting. 

  

Top one kind of looks like a scraper of some sort, even has a nice indentation for the thumb.  Left 2 have the best shape, but the other side of each isn't finished (see pic of reverse below).  Not sure about the other 3 but they seem to be roughly the right shape and look like they've been worked.  Maybe got some rejects they started or my imagination is seeing things in an otherwise completely natural rock. 

Reverse-

Anyway, if these are promising and are actually man made, what's the next step to find more?  I tried putting a shovel in the ground and hit rock almost immediately.

 

Edited February 7 by Not a cat

[CHIEF 5075]

1 hour ago, Not a cat said:

Total newb here, but I was visiting my mother's place in Kyle and noticed a bunch of flakes on a hill on her property.  Found a few promising pieces on the surface, which look like they've been worked but certainly aren't the obvious symmetrically perfect arrowheads a lot of people are posting. 

  

Top one kind of looks like a scraper of some sort, even has a nice indentation for the thumb.  Left 2 have the best shape, but the other side of each isn't finished (see pic of reverse below).  Not sure about the other 3 but they seem to be roughly the right shape and look like they've been worked.  Maybe got some rejects they started or my imagination is seeing things in an otherwise completely natural rock. 

Reverse-

Anyway, if these are promising and are actually man made, what's the next step to find more?  I tried putting a shovel in the ground and hit rock almost immediately.

 

If there is a lot of rock, any points can't be too deep. A 300 gallon tote with a gas pressure washer will do the trick.

CHIEF

[Not a cat 5651]

31 minutes ago, CHIEF said:

If there is a lot of rock, any points can't be too deep. A 300 gallon tote with a gas pressure washer will do the trick.

CHIEF

Hell, It's close enough the house I can just run a hose.  Which would cause my mother to have flashbacks to the 80s when she comes out and sees that her idiot son is destroying her property with one of his projects.

Or I can get that hole digging guy from another thread to come over for a weekend.

[CHIEF 5075]

3 minutes ago, Not a cat said:

Hell, It's close enough the house I can just run a hose.  Which would cause my mother to have flashbacks to the 80s when she comes out and sees that her idiot son is destroying her property with one of his projects.

Or I can get that hole digging guy from another thread to come over for a weekend.

Oh hell yeah. That close, make a screener with a wood frame and some 1/2" mesh galvanized screen from Tractor Supply. Put a shovel load in and rinse the dirt away.

CHIEF

[DoobieWah 1432]

On 2/18/2023 at 2:23 PM, Blotto said:

We were going through some boxes of our parents stuff and stumbled across three bags of arrowheads that they acquired when a relative passed. As she lived in New Mexico, presumably thats where these were collected. Probably 100+ arrowheads and a tool of some sort. Kind of cool, but I'd like to know more about what they are. Anybody know of a good site that makes it easy to identify by region? 

 

 

 

 

 

Those appear to be North African. I'm not sure any American culture routinely made those chevron shaped points. 

See here.

[Shoxthemonkey 1976]

15 hours ago, DoobieWah said:

Those appear to be North African. I'm not sure any American culture routinely made those chevron shaped points. 

See here.

Thanks for that link. I know what I'll be doing for the rest of the day.

[DoobieWah 1432]

It’s a useful site with a lot of knowledgeable people but they can get snarky to noobs. 
 

(Where have I heard that before?🤔)

[Judge Roybeanbag 11819]

On 2/6/2024 at 6:08 PM, Not a cat said:

Total newb here, but I was visiting my mother's place in Kyle and noticed a bunch of flakes on a hill on her property.  Found a few promising pieces on the surface, which look like they've been worked but certainly aren't the obvious symmetrically perfect arrowheads a lot of people are posting. 

  

Top one kind of looks like a scraper of some sort, even has a nice indentation for the thumb.  Left 2 have the best shape, but the other side of each isn't finished (see pic of reverse below).  Not sure about the other 3 but they seem to be roughly the right shape and look like they've been worked.  Maybe got some rejects they started or my imagination is seeing things in an otherwise completely natural rock. 

Reverse-

Anyway, if these are promising and are actually man made, what's the next step to find more?  I tried putting a shovel in the ground and hit rock almost immediately.

 

That's really cool - it basically looks like a core rock and a bunch of stuff someone flaked off and worked on a little.  One of the coolest things I found on my property was similar - there was a core rock, a large piece of chert that probably came from Flint Knob a few miles away:

https://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/plateaus/images/ap2.html

Someone had broken off pieces, but left a bunch there with the core.  A few hard rains exposed it, and the core and all the pieces were just laying there, like whoever it was left them however many years ago.  I left it, marked it with a piece of rebar and gps.  

 

 

 

 

[Judge Roybeanbag 11819]

On 2/6/2024 at 6:08 PM, Not a cat said:

Total newb here, but I was visiting my mother's place in Kyle and noticed a bunch of flakes on a hill on her property.  Found a few promising pieces on the surface, which look like they've been worked but certainly aren't the obvious symmetrically perfect arrowheads a lot of people are posting. 

  

Top one kind of looks like a scraper of some sort, even has a nice indentation for the thumb.  Left 2 have the best shape, but the other side of each isn't finished (see pic of reverse below).  Not sure about the other 3 but they seem to be roughly the right shape and look like they've been worked.  Maybe got some rejects they started or my imagination is seeing things in an otherwise completely natural rock. 

Reverse-

Anyway, if these are promising and are actually man made, what's the next step to find more?  I tried putting a shovel in the ground and hit rock almost immediately.

 

Making stone tools with a copper penis looking thing. 

Edited February 21 by Judge Roybeanbag
Wasn’t the video I intended.

[JCHIL 414]

Found this tool/crude point yesterday while dove hunting in Eastland County.  I looked at the projectile point of Texas and figured it to be a Young Cluster preform….