The juicy details

So...when I said we hadn't been finding much, I was lying. The sites we were surveying the last few weeks were crammed full of stuff as compared to what we were looking at this week. But over the last 5 weeks, I have learned to appreciate the small finds so much more. I'm getting better at picking out cores and scrapers from rocks, and I actually am getting some sense of when they might date from. Exciting stuff.

I don't have any personal pictures, because I dont want to get grit in my camera, but I have scrounged up some pictures online to give you a general idea of what I'm dealing with. This is similar to stuff we were finding, when life was more exciting.

A lithic scatter (aka, a concentration of stone flakes) looks something like this:

Except instead of obsidian (black volcanic stone) we get white chert.

A lithic scatter is a find we have to document, but finding tools is better. Sometimes we get projectile points or scrapers or something that looks on first glance like something exciting.

Stuff like this! circa 2,000 BCE to CE 500



Mostly our tools look like this though:




Thus concludes more than you needed to know about my personal discovery of stone tools.