Great artifact find!

[tjm]

Dirty Chert

[BilletHead]

          Chert ya say? I like Chert 😁

  We have a good variety available!

[tjm]

36 minutes ago, BilletHead said:

I like Chert

It drains well, but it's hard to hoe. But with all the broken stuff I have, in all the years on this place I've only seen one nodule, that the grandson found and soon broke open. This chert doesn't flake well,

[bfishn]

10 hours ago, Deadstream said:

Chert is usually easy to identify. Just put the tip of your tongue on it. If it sticks for a smidge, its chert.  

Good to know, thanks.. But if I could do that with a picture on the web, I'd probably be licking something other than rocks... 🙂

[Huntingducks117]

Very good eye and awesome find for your grandson.  

Here's my best stone find. A partial dragonfly fossil found in Northern Arkansas.

[Johnsfolly]

41 minutes ago, Huntingducks117 said:

Very good eye and awesome find for your grandson.  

Here's my best stone find. A partial dragonfly fossil found in Northern Arkansas.

Wasn't my grandson. I came across that video. That's a pretty cool find!

[tjm]

8 hours ago, Huntingducks117 said:

Very good eye and awesome find for your grandson.  

Here's my best stone find. A partial dragonfly fossil found in Northern Arkansas.

How do you find what those kind of fossils are from? Lots of that sort of thing in my yard, we just call them all 'fossils'.

[bfishn]

8 hours ago, Huntingducks117 said:

Here's my best stone find. A partial dragonfly fossil found in Northern Arkansas.

...or a crinoid and a mollusk...

[Al Agnew]

9 hours ago, Huntingducks117 said:

Very good eye and awesome find for your grandson.  

Here's my best stone find. A partial dragonfly fossil found in Northern Arkansas.

Cool find, but don't think it's a dragonfly.  Nearly all, if not all, of the rock in the northern Arkansas Ozarks is marine in origin...it was originally sea bottom, and therefore would have sea critters in it.  The "body" appears to be a crinoid, and the "wing" impressions are another form of sea life.

[Al Agnew]

For many years I was into hunting artifacts...and had some good places to hunt them.  My former grandfather-in-law had a farm down near Cape Girardeau, with a field on a high bench in the V where two creeks came together.  I found artifacts from just about every period of Native American history there, from Dalton points that were more than 9000 years old to late Woodland and even later.  Found a half a chert hoe, that had been used long enough to smooth and polish the working edge of the chert, and given the hardness of chert, that was a lot of use!

Had another couple fields east of Bonne Terre that were just full of artifacts, and were plowed every year.  That was the key back then...now hardly anybody plows fields anymore.  No till agriculture lost me many of my best spots!

Found a lot of stuff along the banks of Wappapello when the lake was down 5 feet or so in the winter.  Of course, these days it's totally illegal to pick up artifacts on COE reservoirs.

But my very best find was a spectacular, perfect Dalton point, that I found in the Lamotte Sandstone country in Ste. Genevieve County.  I was just walking along a tiny, seasonal creek in the middle of the woods that had a sandy bottom, not even thinking about looking for artifacts.  But when you do it a lot, your eyes get trained to look for them even when you're not looking; I still peruse every bit of bare dirt I come across, no matter where it is.  So when I saw a tiny bit of light colored chert on that sand bottom, I bent over to check it out.  I'm not in the same place my finds are right now or I'd post a photo of it.

These days, most people hunt points in creek bottoms, trying to pick them out from the gravel on the bottom.  I got back into it a little by doing that; found one nice point on the bottom of the wet weather creek behind the house last year, and a couple nice pieces in the wet weather creeks around my cabin on the Meramec.