- We have here an array of projectile points.
And they start with the earliest ones up here.
These are about 5,000 years old.
These are 3,000.
These are about 2,000, about 1,500,
about 1,200 and
1,000 years old.
So we cover 4,000 years of pre-history here.
So as you see, they get smaller as you go down.
Right here is where we get
the introduction of the bow and arrow.
And then everything is bow and arrow after that,
but 1,000 A.D.that's all we have
are very small projectile points.
Any large stone items we have, they're knives,
not projectile points.
They're mostly local raw materials.
Some of the material is Hixton silicified sandstone.
This point right here from a rock shelter
is Hixton silicified sandstone or Hixton quartzite.
And that's material that comes from Jackson County,
so 70 or 80 miles from here is where the quarry source
for that material, the only quarry source for that material.
Over on this side, we have an array of tools.
We have scrapers used to process animal hides,
particularly deer hides.
Most of the clothing is animal hides and
so scrappers are a pretty common item.
We have a quartzite drill here used to perforate something.
We don't know if this was used as an awl
to perforate hides or to cut into wood or stone.
We think they were used for all those things.
Here we have an array of pottery sherds and
the decoration on these sherds
tells us a lot about the time period.
They're very distinct.
These are, at the top, Madison corded pressed sherds
and these date to the same time
as these projectile points down there.
As we go down in time, the decoration changes and
they're a little bit earlier in time.
We have pottery here for about 2,200 years
so it goes back just before A.D. 1, maybe 200 years.
None of these pot sherds are quite that early in this array.
But these date back a 1,000 and 1,500 to 1,800 years ago.
You notice a lot of these projectile points,
these spear points are broken and damaged and
often they'd be probably damaged in a hunting accidents.
And they would simply be discarded.
We don't have horticulture, really not field systems,
but horticulture till about 1,000 years ago.
Associated with these points,
we do find carbonized corn right here on our sites.
So we know they were growing corn here.
Probably wasn't a major part of their diet.
Big part of their diet are animal bones.
I just brought a few bones from our sites here.
This elk bone
from American eastern elk and white-tailed deer.
White-tailed deer are probably the primary food item.
And generally these are broken open to extract the bone marrow.
So they're involved in the hunting and gathering and
only at the very end of pre-history,
1,000 years ago which is pretty late in pre-history,
do we have corn agriculture, horticulture going on.
I do not want to dig the sites away.
I want to leave as much of the site as possible.
In fact, we've gone out of our way
not to over excavate the sites.
We take small samples to see who was here,
what they were doing,
what kind of foods they were eating
and leave the sites for the future.
We have new techniques being developed all the time.
We don't know what the future holds
but if we dig our sites away, we won t have them.
It s a finite resource.
Once they're gone, we can t put them back in the ground.
I have questions about the fauna in the area,
what kind of fish were present.
These are famous trout streams here today,
world famous trout streams.
Everyone says there were brook trout here.
When we do our excavation,
we haven t found a large number of fish
but the fish we find are slow stream fish.
Catfish, fresh water drum fish and suckers
but we haven t found any brook trout bones.
That's one thing I would like to investigate more.
Questions of what was here?