The Accidental Archeologist -- Me!

It was spring and I was working for a lady who ran an aquatics nursery out of her home who lived just across the wide, flat field in the former "Laguna de Santa Rosa" where, for many years, I'd rented a tiny house.

This was a temporary job (although I'd worked for the same woman before many times as both a nursery employee and delivery driver) dividing and potting up about 50 water lilies that she kept in a shallow pond on her property.

The unusually heavy rain of the preceding winter had caused her to have to hire someone earlier in the year with a small "ditch witch" backhoe to dig out narrow (but reasonably "deep") channels around her property to take care of the runoff of rainwater from the many ponds that dotted her property and she'd instructed me to use the soil from that excavation to pot up the lilies.

I'd been at it for about a day and half when, as I was potting one of the lilies, I noticed an object sticking out of the soil. I could tell right away that it was a piece of obsidian and, since I'd lived in this same area for quite a while, I knew obsidian was a fairly rare thing to find there. The entire "Laguna" area had, at one time, been a huge lake that, until the building of a nearby dam in the late 1960s, had swollen every year during the rainy season to encompass an area of several miles in all directions so most of the rocks commonly found there were rounded and smooth from being tumbled for eons beneath the waters of the Laguna.

Sketch of a "bi-face tool" (sans "hook") bearing a very slight resemblance to the one that I found.

I picked the piece of obsidian up and dusted it off, scrutinizing it in the bright sunshine. It was immediately apparent to me that this particular piece of obsidian had been "chipped" or "flaked" -- suggesting it was an arrowhead or other tool. Excitedly, I put the object in my pocket -- thinking I would examine it more closely at home that evening...

Then, the thought entered my mind: "Hey! If I could find something like THAT, I wonder what ELSE I might find?"

Within 5 seconds of having that thought, I became aware of another object lying on the ground right in-between my feet! Upon closer examination, it proved to be a perfectly rendered arrowhead made out of a tannish-white colored rock that I was later to learn was "chert". The "point" (as the archeologists call an arrowhead) was completely undamaged and fairly small in size.

A chert projectile point bearing a very slight resemblance to the one that I found.

I shoved the point into my pocket as well. For the rest of the day, I kept my eyes peeled for other objects but, unfortunately, didn't find any...

That evening at home, I inspected the two objects closely under a small magnifying glass and confirmed that they had indeed been "worked" or "chipped" with small, regular, uniform indentations.  Even though it was small and made out of white stone as opposed to the dark obsidian that I was used to seeing in displays at museums, the purpose of the "point" was obvious: It was plainly an arrowhead.

Unlike where my mother comes from in Missouri or where my husband comes from in Georgia, our region here in Northern California has never been known as a place wherein arrowheads abound... In those other places, it's a fairly common thing to find arrowheads sticking up out of the soil. In my neck of the woods, though, the only paleolithic type artifacts that most people ever find on a regular basis are the stone "mortars and pestles" used by the local Pomo and Miwok Indians to grind acorns.

The fact that the point was white and undamaged, too, definitely made it quite a "find"!

The curious obsidian object's purpose, however, was (and remains) far less obvious... The piece itself was approximately 2" long and about 3/4" in diameter. Each "end" was sheered off flat (either by design or later damage) and had been chipped so that it had 3-sides (or "faces") lengthwise. After examining it carefully for quite a while, I realized that it had a totally unexpected feature!

On one end, at the "apex" between two of the "faces" was just one, expertly-rendered "hook" chipped into the tool! Not only that, the "hook" was angled such that whatever it was meant to hook onto had to have been curved or circular in shape and small enough so that it must have had a very thin "lip" to it, as well.

I couldn't IMAGINE what possible purpose the little tool had been meant to serve!

I put the two artifacts away for probably about two or three years until one evening when a friend of ours -- who just happened to be a roommate of one of the senior staff members of a nearby state university's anthropology department -- stopped by the house for a moment on his way somewhere. When I realized his professor roommate was waiting in his car in my driveway, I grabbed up the arrowhead, ran outside and quickly asked him about it before they left.

He took the point through the car window and turned it in his hands, examining it, before returning it to me.

"Points aren't really my thing," he said as he handed it back, "I'm more of a 'basket guy'... But, I think you just might have something there that a point-guy would be interested in seeing. It's definitely not common, that's for sure."

"I'd take it to somebody and have them check it out," he called out to me as the car started off down the driveway with our friend at the wheel.

Unfortunately, less than two weeks later, our friend's roommate, the archeology professor, died of cancer. He didn't have much of any family at all so a lot of the task of disposing of his belongings fell upon the shoulders of our friend, his roommate. One evening shortly after the professor passed away, our friend came by and, as he was leaving inquired -- almost as an afterthought, "You wouldn't want any of David's books, would you? I've got a whole pile out in the car that I'm going to have to get rid of -- mostly archeology books on local Indian tribes... You can have them if you want any of them."

So, by flashlight in our driveway, I rummaged through a huge assortment of the late professor's many books and textbooks on local, Native American archeology and picked out a few that looked as though they might be good additions to my library. One of them was, I imagined, a textbook for one of the university's archeology courses which outlined the history of each of the Indian tribes of the Northwestern U.S. and included the locations of each of the major archeological recovery sites of each tribe -- along with lots of sketches and photos of many of each location's artifacts.

There was even an entire chapter on the inhabitants of the "Laguna de Santa Rosa" (the very area where I'd recovered the two pieces); although, it mentioned that not a great deal of actual "digging" had been done there due to the fact that most of the land was still in private hands.

Holding the obsidian "hooked" tool in my hand, I poured through the sketches and photos of every artifact in that book -- page by page -- paying careful attention to size, material and cultural association.

The only artifact in the entire book that even faintly resembled what I had, originated with one of the tribes far to the north in Washington State. It was a "net-sinker" used to weigh down the nets with which the natives fished for salmon and it was far, far larger than the object I'd discovered. But the shape was extremely similar and, more to the point, there was the unusual "hook" chipped into it in almost the same location on the object and at that same strange angle!

It made perfect sense to me that any net-sinker found in the Laguna would be substantially smaller than its northern counterpart, since the Indians who lived here would be using their nets to catch considerably smaller fish than King Salmon!

Over the ensuing couple of years, as it happened, I decided to return to college to try and obtain my bachelor's degree and one of the classes that I enrolled in to satisfy part of the requirement for transfer to state college was an anthropology course taught by a woman with a doctorate in archeology which she obtained from the same department at the same state university of which this same late archeology professor had been a member.

She volunteered to take the two pieces I'd found to the archeology staff at the university to be inspected.

Some weeks later, she returned the two pieces to me along with a letter from a senior staff member descibing the artifacts.

In the letter, the professor stated that the artifacts were between 3,000 and 7,000 years old! (This made them some of the oldest known examples of tools ever recovered from the "Laguna" area!) He added that he'd only seen one other similar arrowhead which he described as "a small, chert, 'Houx' projectile point".

As it happened, this particular professor was the son of a couple who had for many, many years owned a nursery located only ONE BLOCK from the location where I discovered my point and it was he, himself, who had discoved my point's "twin" on this same property when he was a very young boy! In fact, it was this discovery of the only other known example of a similar-type point ever found in the entire area which had fueled his lifelong desire to take up archeology as a profession!

About the obsidian object, however, he was far less descriptive. He called it a "bi-face tool of unknown purpose" which he described as "damaged". I don't believe to this DAY that he ever really examined it LONG enough or CLOSELY enough to even discover the modest "hook" on one of its faces! When I suggested that the object bore a very close resemblance to the net-sinkers of more northern tribes, I was told that it was "too small" at which point I dropped discussion of the matter (even though I STILL feel that it was not given the proper amount of consideration).

Through this same this professor, the letter also expressed the university's desire to add the "point" to its collection for further study by graduate students in the future.

I gave the matter a great deal of thought in the days that followed and came to the conclusion that these objects weren't really "mine" in the first place. I merely held "temporary possession" of them because I was the one who found them...

If they "belonged" to anyone, one would have to say they were the possessions of the local, native tribespeople who made them and, since none of their number has survived down to the present day, I decided the next best thing to returning them to their proper owners would be to have them made a part of the general body of public knowledge about those tribes being accumulated and housed by the university.

Besides, what if something happened to them while they were in my care? They could easily get broken, stolen or lost which would negate any positive benefit they might ever serve.

Additionally, if any of these unfortunate situations ever came to pass, it would be my fault.

There was one aspect of the objects' futures that I COULD control, however, and, so, I altered the donation paperwork I'd been given to include the "bi-face tool of unknown purpose". I further stipulated that the two pieces must be cataloged together and remain together as having been found at the same time, in the same location and within the same geophysical "strata".

I also included in the paperwork a statement to be filed with them which stated that I believed the unusual nature of the "hook" worked into the "bi-face tool" made it quite likely that it was a "net-sinker" used by local tribes to catch the small fish that populated the Laguna at that time. The university was happy to accept the terms of my donation.

The night before I sent off the two objects by mail to the university, I had a very vivid dream. I dreamed that I was working doing some landscaping for an older lady. This lady, whom I didn't recognize as being anyone that I've ever known in my life, was living in the same neighborhood that I lived in as a child which is, coincidentally, the same neighborhood of the junior college that I was attending where I had the archeology class. I dreamed that, while digging to install a flowerbed along this woman's fenceline, I accidentally exposed some Indian artifacts.

Upon carefully wiping away the soil, I found various "tools" and "points" -- all arranged in a semi-circular pattern -- almost as if they had been carefully "laid-out" upon an altar.

In the dream, I  told the elderly woman that I could not continue the work until the site had been properly inspected (and, perhaps, thereafter professionally removed and relocated) by a sanctioned representative from the archeological community after which such a representative arrived and confirmed that the find was indeed an important one and I was right in stopping work immediately so as not to disturb the layout of the objects.

There the dream ended and -- much as the Native Americans feel that dreams are unquestionable signs of portend -- I felt the dream was an omen telling me that I was doing the right thing in donating the objects to the university.

And, so, today one can find my two little "archeological gems" in the collection of Sonoma State University's Anthropology/Archeology  Department in Rohnert Park CA. My hope is that, one day, some graduate student will be able to piece the history of the two objects together, I will be vindicated and the description of the "bi-face tool of unknown origin" will be forever changed to read "net-sinker, Laguna de Santa Rosa".

Graphics Acknowledgements:

Archeology clip-art courtesy of Microsoft Office free online clip-art.

Sketch of "bi-face tool" courtesy of:

Lithic Usewear Investigation Report
Harney Dune (35HA718) Obsidian Artifact Assemblage
Report Submitted to:
Anan Raymond, Region 1 Archaeologist
US Fish & Wildlife Service
Order # 101810M312
by
Cameron M. Smith, M.A. 

available online at: web.pdx.edu/~b5cs/harney2000/usewear/harney2.html

Photo of chert projectile point courtesy of the U.S. National Parks Department, Padre Is. TX, webpage at:

http:www.nps.gov/pais/historyculture/people.htm