Gave an Artifact Talk Today . . .

[indianasmith]

The good folks down at the Quinlan, TX history museum asked me to come down and give a lecture on Indian artifacts and identify some points for people.  I was also told I'd be welcome to bring any items I had for sale, so I loaded up several cases of personal finds and three boxes of sale points, plus a couple frames, and drove down to speak.  The room seated about 50 people, and it was packed, with chairs being brought in and some folks standing, by the time I started.  I spoke for about 30 minutes, gave a break, and then spoke a bit longer and did some Q&A.  All told, it lasted an hour and a half.  I had a great time, the folks enjoyed it, and I sold about $112 in "box points," which will come in really handy this week.  It was big fun!!!









I also got to finally hold this gem in my own hands - a 3 3/4" Scotty found by my friend Jimmy two years ago - the one he is now trying to sell.

[3mnkids]

cool.     Sounds like you had a great time. Its nice that you can make a little extra cash while talking about something you are passionate about. good job.

[Silverlady]

Sounds like your day was very interesting and productive.  I would probably enjoy a lecture like that ...  I occasionally check out events here in PA that have to do with the area local history.     

[Ed, Ego and Superego]

On that note Indy... Do you have any good gallery sites on the artifacts found associated the Mound City Ohio People (Cahokian maybe? I don't recall)> I recently read a bit about how developed their carving and such were and now I'm curious.
-Ed

[flackbait]

Congradulations, that sounds like a fun and productive day! Out of curiosity I gotta ask a couple of questions with arrowheads can you tell which tribes made them? For example if you had an Cherokee and a Sioux arrowhead could you tell the differnce between them? Also what kinds of materials did tribes use to make arrowheads? I'm only aware of them using obsidian, flint and maybe bone(?) but beyond that I have no clue?

[indianasmith]

On that note Indy... Do you have any good gallery sites on the artifacts found associated the Mound City Ohio People (Cahokian maybe? I don't recall)> I recently read a bit about how developed their carving and such were and now I'm curious.
-Ed

I imagine if you just google Cahokia and Spiro Mounds you can pull up lots of interesting stuff.   Cahokia was excavated by professional archeologists in the 60's, so everything is in museums and university collections and has been published.  Spiro was dug by amateurs back in the 1930's who sold everything they found . . . so that material is scattered in collections all over the country.  Not as good for information, but if you do a bit of searching, you can actually own pieces from that site - my friend Jim Cox in Oklahoma has spent years assembling a beautiful collection of Spiro material.  There is also an excellent book by Chris and Larry Merriam about Spiro Mound with tons of photographs of the unbelievable stuff that came out of it.  It was truly an incredible site.

[indianasmith]

Congradulations, that sounds like a fun and productive day! Out of curiosity I gotta ask a couple of questions with arrowheads can you tell which tribes made them? For example if you had an Cherokee and a Sioux arrowhead could you tell the differnce between them? Also what kinds of materials did tribes use to make arrowheads? I'm only aware of them using obsidian, flint and maybe bone(?) but beyond that I have no clue?

That is probably the single most frequently asked question about arrowheads, and the answer is no.  Primarily because the vast majority of stone tools - arrowheads, spearheads, knives, scrapers, etc. - that we find are over 500 years old.  Since Native Americans here in the U.S. had no written language, we have no idea what tribes existed before the contact era.  Some of the points we find are thousands of years old, and while we can identify them by shape and style and use carbon dating to tell how old they are, we have no idea what the language, religion, or tribe of their makers were.  We assign names to the cultures based on the unique tools that they used - Basketmaker, Mound-Builder, Cody Complex, and so on - but it's purely arbitrary.
  As far as material, any stone that has about a 7 on the hardness scale can be used to make points.  Various flints, cherts, quartzites, jaspers, and chalcedony all fall into that range.  In deep East Texas, the most common lithic material is petrified wood.  So you see hundreds of thousans of  petrified wood arrowheads and spearpoints found in the triangle between Lakes Livingston, Toledo Bend, and Sam Rayburn.  That was just the best material they had.

BTW, if anyone is really interested in this hobby, two great forums can be found at these websites:

www.prosbb.comn
www.arrowheadology.com

See ya there!

[flackbait]

Congradulations, that sounds like a fun and productive day! Out of curiosity I gotta ask a couple of questions with arrowheads can you tell which tribes made them? For example if you had an Cherokee and a Sioux arrowhead could you tell the differnce between them? Also what kinds of materials did tribes use to make arrowheads? I'm only aware of them using obsidian, flint and maybe bone(?) but beyond that I have no clue?

That is probably the single most frequently asked question about arrowheads, and the answer is no.  Primarily because the vast majority of stone tools - arrowheads, spearheads, knives, scrapers, etc. - that we find are over 500 years old.  Since Native Americans here in the U.S. had no written language, we have no idea what tribes existed before the contact era.  Some of the points we find are thousands of years old, and while we can identify them by shape and style and use carbon dating to tell how old they are, we have no idea what the language, religion, or tribe of their makers were.  We assign names to the cultures based on the unique tools that they used - Basketmaker, Mound-Builder, Cody Complex, and so on - but it's purely arbitrary.
  As far as material, any stone that has about a 7 on the hardness scale can be used to make points.  Various flints, cherts, quartzites, jaspers, and chalcedony all fall into that range.  In deep East Texas, the most common lithic material is petrified wood.  So you see hundreds of thousans of  petrified wood arrowheads and spearpoints found in the triangle between Lakes Livingston, Toledo Bend, and Sam Rayburn.  That was just the best material they had.

BTW, if anyone is really interested in this hobby, two great forums can be found at these websites:

www.prosbb.comn
www.arrowheadology.com

See ya there!

Thanks for answering my questions, I've been wondering about those for a while.