questions from the gallery

My friend writes:


Okay, so, explain something to the uninformed here: how do you know this li'l bit o' quartz is a "crystal scraper" and not just a li'l bit o' quartz that just happened to be there? Are there marks that can be clearly identified as man-made?

Yep!


it's easier to see the marks on an opaque stone.



This scraper is much like the quartz one, only more complete. We have the 'business' end of the quartz scraper; the haft end would be harder for me to tell was worked, but I think someone who knows lithics like Dick would recognize it. These flaked-off scars don't happen naturally (although you can get very rough bifaces from a rockcrusher like for road gravel). Apart from the fact that it _is_ a scraper, which I agree is hard to tell from a photo, chances are glass would have tiny almost microscopic bubbles in it. But the chemical composition of glass and quartz are much the same. Which is one reason crystalline quartz makes decent tools: you want something with a molecular structure as much like glass as possible, to flake sharp and stay sharp.


Does that kind of rock not grow there naturally, and couldn't have been deposited there by, say, a receding glacier?

This piece of land, once you get about an inch down, is all wind-deposited sand. Someplace like my yard, which is indeed all glacially deposited gravel, I would still give a piece of quartz that clear a second look.

What would you expect to find at this site, given what you know of the history?
How much of that "modern history" research do y'all do before you start digging, especially in an urban location, to make sure the spot wasn't the dumping ground for some major 1940s construction project?

We know that across the modern street, across the river, and up the hill there were very thick layers of Indian occupation. There are stories in the 1870's (I think) about the construction of the mills on the river and the huge numbers of stone arrowheads and tools they found (none of which, sadly, do we have). One of the attractions to this piece of land was that not that much had happened to it in terms of European settlement; we have 19th century engravings that don't show anything in particular , but the drawings were selective and a small metal works might not have been interesting enough to show.

As to it being a dumping ground, I am not sure how one would find that out, except by digging. There was some weird stuff going on with fill, which was why the water main is useful to know about. We are digging partly to find out if anything is still here. All that stuff we did up north a couple of years ago, when we found nothing -- that told us that modern forestry is indeed less destructive of local soils than the 19th c clearcutting and burning, which caused a hell of a lot of erosion. Dick figures there is Extract of Site in a lot of river bottoms up against the dams. He is fond of saying that if we knew what we'd find, we wouldn't have to dig it.


I hope this is some help. I had trouble believing in worked stone too.

Laura, wishing the weather would get less humid.