Arrowhead?

Absolutely!
Congrats.

Most definitely and a pretty darn nice one too!

Yes, nice find. I would do some more walking in that field, esp after it has been worked and maybe a rain. We find them occasionally but not in good as shape as that one in a field we have next to timber and a crick.

I've never found one surprising since I used to spend a lot of time in the fields. I did find a scraping tool with very clear grind marks were it was sharpened.

I love in the black dirt region of new York, the black dirt was basically a ancient swamp that a little over a hundred years ago they started to drain and farm it. It's flat as a air for miles( would be great place to build a nice target range) but I guess since it was a swamp it was very heavily hunted by the natives, so it's a good place to search for heads.

I believe this it the type of swamp that will become a oil deposit in the future, it was drained when the Delaware and Hudson D&H canal was made way back. It was known for years as the onion capital of the world, they still grow a bunch but hemp is taking over fast.

it's very strange soil very soft and rich, I've seen tractors and many of the old deuce and a halfs sink in minutes. Me and a few friends in 2009 found a tusk from a mastodon in the walkill river in pine island when fishing. It was in the bank, we cal!ed the collage and they sent someone out. Well that guy ended up taking credit for it and started a edited .

Maybe one day I'll find a arrowhead.

Here some pictures of the black dirt.

Man that's a bunch of onions!

Not to be too pedantic, but that isn't an arrowhead, although people often call them that. Given the size and shape, that is going to be (most likely) a dart point. The generic term would be "projectile point." If it was an arrowhead, then it would have been on an arrow fired from about a 10' bow, probably by one of the mythic giant races people claimed to have lived in North America. More than likely, that is a dart point as would have been fired from an atlatl. I don't know the chronological typologies for where you are, but atlatls were in use in the New World from 10-12k years ago up until historic times.

Disclaimer - while I was an archaeologist for 25 years, I wasn't a lithicist.

If it is not an arrowhead, it's the doggonedest confluence of geological events that I've seen all week.

Great find.

Todd.

Double Naught Spy said:

Not to be too pedantic, but that isn't an arrowhead, although people often call them that. Given the size and shape, that is going to be (most likely) a dart point. The generic term would be "projectile point." If it was an arrowhead, then it would have been on an arrow fired from about a 10' bow, probably by one of the mythic giant races people claimed to have lived in North America. More than likely, that is a dart point as would have been fired from an atlatl. I don't know the chronological typologies for where you are, but atlatls were in use in the New World from 10-12k years ago up until historic times.

Disclaimer - while I was an archaeologist for 25 years, I wasn't a lithicist.

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If your observation is based on the size of the hand holding it, that appears to be the daughters hand which may be quite small.

Cool find. Located where? Atlatl is pretty unlikely outside the Southwest and Arctic.

Its an arrowhead I have 2 shoe boxes filled with them, not from a 10' bow???

.Actually, DocRock,atlatl technology preceded the bow and arrow across North and Central America and in much of the world. Atlatls were still in use in Mesoamerica when the Spanish first arrived there.
https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-an-atlatl-169989

The atlatls themselves were usually made of wood, but some have been found that were bone (at least Old World), and so have not preserved as well. However, the technology as evidenced by dart points, pictographs, petroglyphs, atlatl weights, and actual atlatls are found throughout the the New World. Here are some US examples...

Virginia
https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/ask-an-archaeologist/blades-and-points-in-nova/

Ohio
https://www.nps.gov/cuva/planyourvisit/the-prehistoric-people.htm

Minnesota
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffers_Petroglyphs

Nevada
https://lasvegasareatrails.com/petroglyphs-in-valley-of-fire-state-park-nevada/#:~:text=The petroglyphs come from Atlatl Rock (the name,accused of shooting two prospectors in the 1890s.
http://users.stlcc.edu/mfuller/atlatlrock.html

Florida
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272308681_Cushing's_Key_Marco_Atlatls

Actual atlatls recovered (not the darts)
https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/v...=feature&mid=16vycutsFOGE3GOJuCFnSwRGkSro&z=3

I would also agree that it's an atl-atl dart point, although it could also be used as a knife, and that form is a common one in the later parts of the Late Archaic into the early Woodland Period. The type has many names depending on the area where it was found, Adena and Gary would be a couple of them. Bow and arrow technology seems to appear in the Mid-South around 700AD, it varies according to region. True arrowheads are smaller, sometimes very small, and despite the popular name of "bird points" the small forms were used on everything from small game up to bison. Some typical arrow point forms from southern Mississippi made from local gravel chert pictured below. The triangle form is also very popular during this time.

Nice point! I spend a good amount of time each year before the crops cover everything hunting artifacts. Generally speaking, if there's one, there's bound to be more.....good hunting!

Nice references Double Naught Spy.

Very nice find. I've got to go with a dart point as well. While most people have heard of arrow heads, atlatls and dart points are less well known. While there are many more ways to distinguish the two, size seems most commonly used. Atlatls can be compared to black powder firearms that launched a relatively large, heavy, projectile with a rainbow shaped trajectory to a bow (smokeless powder) that launched a smaller, lighter, projectile with a much flatter trajectory. While bows go back over a thousand years on this continent, atlatls go back much farther.

magyars4 said:

Nice point! I spend a good amount of time each year before the crops cover everything hunting artifacts. Generally speaking, if there's one, there's bound to be more.....good hunting!

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I was a very serious collector for many years, some injuries and a bad knee have curtailed my arrowhead hunting activities greatly. We hunt for them in creeks, in our area it's a very productive method.

Absolutely that is an "arrow head". Things of that size could be a knife, spear point. I know atlatls were suggested, but I have thrown atlatls, and they are very light. Longer than an arrow, but not heavy, and the pictured piece looks heavy.

I took enough pictures of atlatls being thrown, and you may not see the flex with your eye, but the shaft flexes and, bends in flight. You can see this in this series of buffalo hunt pictures. The buffalo were pretty much safe from the hunters.







If the location of the spear point was an Indian work shop, you will find a lot of scrap, and items that only an archeologist would recognize. I took my stuff to an archeologist to look at, and one piece that looks more like a guitar pick, was a hide scraper. And, from the location I picked up points, the time span varied. I had woodland, archaic, Mississippian. Might have been a thousand year span or more, in when the points were made. (Only when they find whiskey bottles, cigarette butts and Indian porno magazines with the points can they date these with any confidence of age) I was told, as a general rule, the older stone work was finer finished, more work went into the point.

For the land owners sake, it's not an artifact. Otherwise they wouldn't ever be able to do anything with that field again.

My maternal Grandfather had a collection of stone "arrowheads", with a few more exotic things thrown in, like a stone base for a friction firestarter. He was a farmer in Indiana.

That reminded me of a visit to the British Museum in London. As I was walking through he exhibits, there was one of those "hands on" exhibits manned by a senior citizen docent. There were a number of stone objects, including a fist sized rock smooth on one side, sharp on the other. When I guessed it was a hand axe, he complimented me on having a good eye. He commented that it fit the hand of almost everyone who came through. I then made the mistake of asking how old it was. "About 500,000 years".
"You let me pick up something half a million years old? What if I dropped it and it broke?"
"Oh, we have a whole crate of them in the back. They are pretty common in Europe. If you do the numbers, even if there were very few humans at the time, they were making them for about a million years or so."

Slamfire said:

I was told, as a general rule, the older stone work was finer finished, more work went into the point.

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I am sorry that somebody misled you so badly. How refined the working is had nothing to do with age of the projectile. Older points are not necessarily finer finished and it isn't a rule that they were. In fact, a lot of the Archaic points look like crap. A lot of the more recent prehistoric projectile points made within the last 1000 years are amazingly exquisite. For example, an Archaic Period Kent dart point is often very crudely made https://www.projectilepoints.net/Points/Kent.html whereas Late Prehistoric Toyah arrow points are much more refined in their manufacture. http://www.projectilepoints.net/Points/Toyah.html

Citron said:

For the land owners sake, it's not an artifact. Otherwise they wouldn't ever be able to do anything with that field again.

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Not true. Here in the US, we don't have any such antiquities laws that would preclude landowners from using their property as they see fit. Private property is still private property. To get federal protection of antiquities on private property is actually somewhat convoluted process, usually involved in getting the particular location of the archaeological site on the National Register of Historic Places. That is done by the landowner or the landowner's agent. If said archaeological site is deemed worthy and accepted, the site will go on the National Register of Historic Places and the landowner will agree to not modify, disturb, or take artifacts from the site and (often) will afford protections for the site in exchange for economic considerations (including, but not limited to tax breaks).

Thanks for the learning experience. I work in government, managing a number of maintenance and construction projects. I have to deal with the preservation laws on many projects. I just assumed it applied equally, but after your comment, I reviewed the Washington state code, and it only applies to public projects.

GNP said:

I was a very serious collector for many years, some injuries and a bad knee have curtailed my arrowhead hunting activities greatly. We hunt for them in creeks, in our area it's a very productive method.

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I've spent a considerable amount of time in the creeks and rivers here and they have never been productive for me.

magyars4 said:

I've spent a considerable amount of time in the creeks and rivers here and they have never been productive for me.

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It does vary quite a bit by the area you're in, if you move down a little further south of the area we creek hunt it's very difficult to find anything due to the creeks being full of deep sand and gravel, and the topography plays a part in that too. For a lot of stuff to get into the creeks there have to be at least parts of sites eroding into the stream beds, and if the banks along the edge of the creek aren't high enough then the sites will be farther away from that edge, and not as subject to eroding in. That's likely the reason we find mostly Archaic and earlier Woodland stuff, the later peoples who had begun to practice a little bit of horticulture (and thus had more permanent settlements) were backing up further away from the creek and less of their stuff was finding its way into the bed loads of the creeks. So you're looking for a specific kind of creek, it needs to have a hard bottom, even if covered with a manageable amount of sand and rock, and it needs to have banks high enough to allow them to have been setting up the seasonal camps close enough to the edge that later stream meander would wash stuff into the creeks. To find stuff in our creeks also requires digging in the sand, you're just not going to find much visually, the stone artifacts tend to sink to the bottom over time so they'll be found along that hard bottom. Many places you can just "coon" through the sand with your hands, but deeper water might require a shovel...these methods work well in the area where we hunt, but may not apply well to other areas.

When I lived in Oklahoma some folks would walk along the Arkansas river when it was low and find points. Around Tulsa the river was wide but not always deep so guess that helped.