Thank you very much for reading the posts and comments on the Archaeology in Tennessee blog. Each visitor is a welcome and valued guest. If you have any questions, concerns, comments, or just some random things you would like to say to Tracy C. Brown, owner of the Archaeology in Tennessee blog, please send them to the following e-mail address:
orari14@gmail.com
Have a wonderful day!!!
Tracy, just dropping by really quick to thank you for the little “gift.” I hope you don’t mind but I’ve copied what you said along with the video as the next blog post on my blog. My knee still hurts, but this video IS excellent. Everyone needs to hear it. Thank you, bud. (big hugs). Adrienne.
In possession of my great grandfather, Edward Myer’s artifacts from the Stone Age.
I would like to purchase the two volumes of “Stone Age”. Please contact me via email. I live in Carthage, Tennessee.
i have found what i believe to b the shape of a skull either imprinted or fossilized on a piece of limestone i found it in the calfkiller river area around the monterey side i really truly believe with all my heart it is special a guy has done offered me $1000.00 for it and i refused please get back with me so i can have it furthered looked at
Love the site!!!!!! I don’t do a lot of email, so I’m going to get to the point. I do a lot of outdoors field walking and digging where I’m allowed, and I like to go in holes in the ground where no one else likes to. With that said. I went to a cave in Middle Tennessee and was looking and digging around. In the wall was a hole big enough to where i could put my fist together and into the hole. However, that is not what I did. I looked into that creepy hole, and it looked like something dead, like a bird or something was in the hole. I grabbed this thing and new I had something before I ever pulled it out. So here it is, and I would love for someone to tell me what it is.
Tracy, I recently read some of your commentary on flint fish hooks, and was intrigued about your conclusions that most, if not all are fakes, frauds, etc.
I am in possession of a fish hook specimen that was found by my mother on a hunt in 1963 on the banks of the Ohio River (the Kentucky side), when I was 10 years of age. I was present when she found it and can “verify” that it wasn’t planted by anyone nefarious. It was in a washed out drainage between two ag fields on an uncles farm. It has never been offered for sale or otherwise marketed as far as I know.
I took possession when she passed a few years ago.
I have been collecting points and other surface finds all over the country since she took me in the fields 60 years ago.
Thoughts ?
Hi Vernon. Thanks for commenting. Well, I have to be honest with you. I very much doubt that you, your mother, or anyone else can “verify” that your flint fishhook “was not planted by anyone nefarious.” I think doing that would have required 24-hour, 7-day-per-week, decades-long video monitoring of the spot where it was found and the drainage pathway upstream from the spot where it was found. I very much doubt that anyone did that kind of monitoring across the decades before your mom found the flint fishhook in question.
The really big problem with all flint fishhooks is that no professional archaeologist in North America has ever found a flint fishhook in a professional excavation grid square that was excavated into undisturbed archaeological deposits beneath the upper (plow zone) stratigraphic layer. Archaeologists have excavated the living daylights out of an extraordinarily large number of prehistoric archaeological sites in North America. No flint fishhook has ever been found in situ in any grid square———ever. Really!!!
Any flint fishhook found on the ground surface, whether in the front yard of a house or in a drainage gully between two agricultural fields, is automatically a suspected fake—-even the one found at the Fish School Mound Group in Iowa. Outside of a few archaeologists in Iowa, I very much doubt that any professional archaeologist will ever accept a flint fishhook as an authentic prehistoric artifact until one is found in situ in secure archaeological context within an excavation grid square on a known prehistoric archaeological site.
The flint fishhook found on the ground surface near the Fish School Mound Group was in the Iowa state collections for many years. A new curator of the state collections showed up after many years. One day, without anyone else knowing about it beforehand, this new curator discarded the flint fishhook—-probably in an office wastebasket—and it was never seen or heard from again. Why did he discard it? He discarded it because of the classical professional archaeological assumption that there is not now—and never has been—any such thing as an authentic prehistoric flint fishhook made by ancient Native Americans.
I very much doubt that the flint fishhook your mother found is an authentic prehistoric artifact. No other professional archaeologist will ever tell you that it is an authentic prehistoric artifact. However, because it was found by your mother, and it has sentimental value to you, I would recommend that you keep your mom’s flint fishhook and pass it down to your children as a family heirloom—-with a stipulation that they should never sell it or trade it away. If a professional archaeologist ever does find a flint fishhook deep down in an excavation grid square, you or your children might want to ask a professional archaeologist to take a good look at it to see how it compares/contrasts with the one found in the grid square. Do you have a photograph of the flint fishhook your mother found?
Let me close with one last thing—-lithic shatter material. Shatter material is random lithic debris that is created incidental to the otherwise intentional flint knapping process. I have seen pieces of random shatter material that some artifact collectors define—wrongly—as flint fishhooks. They are pieces of flint that shatter off (from a larger piece of flint) in crude hook shapes during percussion flaking. They are usually small and easy to spot because they are hook-shaped and their surfaces tend to be mostly smooth in texture like the surfaces of unretouched unifacial blades—meaning little to no evidence of fine pressure flaking is present on the artifact. These things are not flint fishhooks. Try not to confuse the two.
Have a happy day Vernon!!!
Tracy