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Showerthought: heard a museum guy on a podcast say most arrowheads people find are just debitage, and I went through my jar of 40 and he was right
I was listening to a podcast about local archaeology last week while driving to a job in Council Bluffs and this curator from a state museum said something that bugged me. He said like 90 percent of what folks pick up in fields and creeks is just flakes and chips from tool making, not actual points. So I got home and dumped out the coffee can I've been filling since I was a kid, 40 something pieces I've found walking the same creek bottom near my grandparents' place, and honestly he was right. Maybe 6 of them are real points, the rest are chunks and shatter I just grabbed because they looked worked. Now I'm second guessing whether the two I've got framed on the wall are even the real deal or just cool looking rocks. Kind of a bummer but also makes me want to learn what to actually look for out there. Anybody got a good resource for telling flakes from actual tools? And should I bother keeping the rest or just toss them back?
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carr.brooke20d ago
Something that helped me was just laying them all out on a white towel in daylight and sorting by shape instead of by "does it look cool." Real points have that obvious stem or notch and you can see tiny edge work where it was thinned and sharpened, while flakes are usually curvy and thin with a ridge running down the back. I kept my maybe-points in a separate pile and gave the rest to a neighbor kid who was getting into rocks, so they didn't go to waste. That state museum guy was probably right, but finding out half your jar is trash is still better than never knowing what you actually have.
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