Flint Arrow Heads?

[rcmodel]

Anyone here collect them?

As a boy growing up, there was a farmer who lived 3 miles east of our farm who had picked up two cigar boxes full of flint & obsidian arrow heads, spear points, and hide scrapers out of a little 30 acre field next to a small creek over the years.
( Anderson's County Ks -Deer Creek)

The thing was, there was no flint within 80 miles to the west, and no obsidian within 500 miles in any direction.

Yet, that little field was littered with black obsidian and translucent flint arrow heads & spear points every time he plowed it each spring and it rained and washed them out of the dirt.

Now comes the question.
Why?

Knapping flint arrow-heads was long, hard, skilled labor for skilled people.
And a perfect arrowhead probably held some value to the owner.

They surely didn't just scatter them to the wind like dust, or lose them if they could recover the arrows.

Was this a practice field?
Or a huge encampment of Indian flint knappers that dropped a lot of arrow heads and lost them?
Or the scene of a battle between two tribes, and there was no one left to collect the spoils of war?

Nobody else I know of ever found an arrow head while farming the surrounding farms.

So why the concentration in this one little 30 acre field next to a little creek?

rc

 

[49willys]

There was probably a camp where the field is.

 

[loosegoose]

If the field is close to a creek or river,it may have flooded a camp scattering all kinds of stuff.Indians always camped near water sourse. creeks are good places to search for arrowheades too

 

[rcmodel]

I thought about flooding.

But it still seems to me losing all your stone weapons from two different regions of the country in a small creek flood in a 30 acre field would be something nobody would let happen.

All they had to do was walk or run 150 feet away and they would have never been in the flood plane.

And if you had to get out of Dodge in a hurry when the creek started rising.
Wouldn't you take all your weapons with you?

I have seen that little creek raise several feet in a few hours during torrential spring rain.

But not fast enough you couldn't get out of the way hopping on one leg carrying a deer skin sack full of arrows and flint heads to make more.

I thought about a big camp too, as it would have been an ideal place.
Still, what happened to cause a field to be littered with stone tools and weapons??

It just seems too much effort went into making stone points & tools to just lose them on the ground around a camp.

One guy drops one, somebody else or a kid would find it and pick it up.

A battleground between two tribes makes more sense to me.
Especially with the mix of fairly local flint and western black obsidian arrowheads and spear points in the same little field????


rc

 

[Officers'Wife]

It could be the area was a migration route for game animals and the heads you find were lost arrows. In our little slice of heaven it's possible to find really nice points on just about any sand hill in the area. Simply because in the days when the People roamed this area the low ground was all swamp and the hills were where the animals where.

 

[hso]

The creek is part of the solution to the puzzle, but the missing pieces are what the terrain and vegetation and game trails were like that made that one particular area popular. It would also be valuable to know if they're mostly small bird points or large game points in guessing why "there".

 

[rcmodel]

Just about every size you could imagine from small bird points to large spear heads.

I think the average was probably about the size of a modern broad head though.

rc

 

[Laphroaig]

Could it be that the site was a long standing native settlement and the points are rejects? Or the points are the remains of a battle where the victors didn't take what remained after the battle?

As for the different materials the points were made of, native American culture was much more sophisticated than the history books written by the victors (us) report. There probably was common trading between tribes that could result in valuable materials traveling long distances.

I encourage you to read the book "1491" if you are interested in the history of native Americans. The picture that the author paints is certainly different than the nomadic "savages" that we learned about in our high school history class and watching cowboy movies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus

Laphroaig

 

[HoosierQ]

I think what we have to realize is how long these points were accumulating in that spot. A given style of point did change over time but slowly and maybe subtly...or perhaps almost not at all. So two arrowheads in the same corn field may have easily been lost 3,000 years apart from one another.

Flint was one of the most sought after commodities in the stone age world. There was commerce in that material all over the world. It would have been traded far and wide.

Kansas is very rich land. I would expect that one of the commodities that the people of ancient Kansas had to trade was Bison products: Robes, and dried meat. Buffalo robes were an important trade commodity and the ancient People of Kansas would have been in a great position to take advantage of that resource...even before the horse.

 

[nmlongbow]

Anyone learning to knap arrowheads will make a lot of mistakes either breaking individual heads or turning out a less than perfect finished product. I doubt anyone would want to take all of the mistakes with them when it was time to move the camp. It could also be a camp that was attacked and most of the people killed.

Disease and starvation killed a lot of the Natives too so many could have died that way and the few who were left couldn't travel with more than the bare essentials.

 

[sirgilligan]

I know of a place that has flint, limestone, and what appears to be some form of granite arrow heads, spear heads, and strange tools including hide scrapers or maybe axe heads.

I took pictures of this person's collection and then studied some books at a university. What I discovered was the style of the pieces ranged over several thousand years. Some as new as 400 years old, some were ancient.

 

[lemaymiami]

Here's another book for those interested in pre-Columbian Peoples -this one written by a European that lived among tribes along the Gulf coast from what is now Florida all the way around to the Browsville Texas region. The RELACION de Cabeza de Vaca was written within one hundred years of Columbus' first arrival (and before there were any Europeans in most of the worlds described during his years long odyssey, and was translated into many languages..). It was actually a best seller for some years (if they had "best sellers" back then since it was pretty much one of the only early accounts describing the area at the time).

While the book is much more about lifestyles than weapons making (it was actually written for the King of Spain to explain just how wrong things went in an early expedition to "la Florida" as it was known back then). One of my customers recommended it to me since she knew I had an interest in early Florida history. It reads pretty well for over five hundred years old... and is available in English.

In a nutshell he describes different tribes living very differently - some were only farmers, others concentrated on fishing, some were great traders -others were essentially raiders, taking what they could from less capable tribes. All of this had been in place for centuries before any contact with Europeans, and was quickly lost as "civilization" brought contact with terrible consequences for native peoples.

 

[hso]

While this is interesting the question of how they got there isn't within our scope.