Personal Best Spot

[snagged in outlet 3]

33 minutes ago, fishinwrench said:

further breeding with our already reptilian politicians.

Or biologists 

[Hog Wally]

11 hours ago, BilletHead said:

          Gut shot dinosaurs are hard to get clean after following up and finding the beast. I did find that Sous Viding the primal cuts works well. It takes one heck of a bonfire to sear it though.  I think I will stay with the atlatl and dart tipped with a Clovis or Folsom and peruse megafauna. Unlike dinosaurs megafauna has a good fat layer protecting them from the glacial  events. In campfire prehistoric man cooking circles they knew fat is where it's at,

  BilletHead

Speaking of Clovis and Folsom, in this cold weather I have to resort to digging the front yard up for goodies.  I've found Clovis Folsom and dalton serrated on my hill.  Pretty cool.  

[BilletHead]

  Nice!

    We need to do some show and tell by PM soon. In a few days expect one ,

BilletHead

[fishinwrench]

Rather than Google Clovis and Folsom I'd much rather have one of you educate me.

[BilletHead]

15 minutes ago, fishinwrench said:

Rather than Google Clovis and Folsom I'd much rather have one of you educate me.

   There may be some training involved. Tied up with Goose fest 2017 and company for a few days . 

[Chief Grey Bear]

28 minutes ago, BilletHead said:

   There may be some training involved. Tied up with Goose fest 2017 and company for a few days . 

He's got rocks in his head. He's closer than he knows! 

[Hog Wally]

3 hours ago, fishinwrench said:

Rather than Google Clovis and Folsom I'd much rather have one of you educate me.

 

[Al Agnew]

Archaic artifacts.  8 to 10 thousand years old at least, from back in the days when the first "Native" Americans hunted stuff like mastodons.  Clovis points are the oldest of all the artifacts found in Missouri.  They are lanceolate (leaf shaped), average about 4 inches long, beautifully flaked, with fluted, thinned bases.  They were spear points, meant to be mounted on heavy spears, and the shape is such that there wouldn't be any protuberances once they were mounted, unlike the slightly less old Dalton points, which have slightly flared bases and are designed for lighter spears, with the bases sticking out a bit from the spear shaft.  The theory is that Clovis points were designed for hunting huge animals like mastodons and mammoths by surrounding them and repeatedly stabbing them and removing the spear, so that the animal eventually bled to death even if a vital organ wasn't reached.  Hence the streamlined shape when mounted on a heavy spear shaft...nothing to get hung up in the animal.  Dalton points, on the other hand, are 6-8 thousand years old, made and used after the huge mammals disappeared, and designed for use with atlatls for hunting deer and elk, and having the spear point stick in the animal to cause it more problems as it ran off.

Clovis points were found in association with mastodon bones at what is now Mastodon State Park, proving that prehistoric people in Missouri hunted mastodons.  There are salt springs at Mastodon State Park, and either the hunters ambushed the animals there, or found them mired in the swampy land surrounding the springs.

I remember all this from research I did for the book I'm still trying to finish writing about the Meramec river system.

[tjm]

I have often wondered what the people here between 4000BPE and 1800 used to hunt with, all the sharp rocks that I've ever seen found locally fall into that 5-10,000BPE category. Also have wondered why as time advanced the workmanship deteriorated.

[Al Agnew]

10 hours ago, tjm said:

I have often wondered what the people here between 4000BPE and 1800 used to hunt with, all the sharp rocks that I've ever seen found locally fall into that 5-10,000BPE category. Also have wondered why as time advanced the workmanship deteriorated.

I've wondered that, too.  Some of the true arrowheads from later periods have excellent workmanship, but most of it doesn't compare with those early points.  It had to be a cultural thing.  Maybe there was cultural, even religious, significance to the way the points were made, not just utilitarian.

I've found plenty of points from later periods over the years, far more than the early ones.  There was one field I hunted years ago that had points from every period, from Dalton on, so it was obviously a highly valued camp or village site.

But another thing I find interesting and mysterious is why you really CAN (supposedly) tell how old a point is from its construction.  Stop and think.  Why do all points from a given period look like they were made by the same individual?  Why the "purity" of style?  Weren't there mavericks out there who made points their own way?  Obviously, with some exceptions, a point could be made in many different ways and still accomplish its purpose.  Was there a big workshop where all the flint knappers got together and learned how to make points using the exact same patterns?  Why didn't somebody from the Woodland period find a Dalton point and think, "Hey, I like how that thing looks.  I think I'll try making some just like that; I'm pretty sure they'd work as good or better than what Joe the expert flint knapper back at the village is making."  And DID Indians from one period find old points (like we do these days) when they were plowing up their field and decide to use them?  Surely they did.  

I really miss artifact hunting.  It's gotten so difficult to find spots to hunt that I gave it up.  The last few I found were when I plowed up my own ground for putting in food plots, and it was just uplands with no particular attractiveness to Indians.  If you can actually find three or four points in a couple acres of nondescript ground, just how many points are actually still waiting to be found, and how many of them were made and lost or discarded anyway?