My brother and I continued our dig on the small shelter on Christmas day and man, we were rewarded! This shelter continues to give up a nice variety of artifacts, it just keeps on giving. My brother was working the sifter as I dug the entrance of the shelter when I heard "Oh My God" and something like "the best one yet". I saw him reach to the bottom of the sifter and oh so gingerly poked his finger up thru the screen and held up this tiny, tiny point. It nearly passed thru the screen, close call. He pulled off his glove and tried to hand it to me but the tip had embedded into his skin. Talk about sharp! The photo does little justice to show it's true beauty. My heart was thumping so hard, I just about fell out of the shelter. Neither of us had ever seen one of these small points in person, and here we are on our trembling knees holding one! Both of us are fairly new at digging shelters so nearly every find has caused our blood pressure to jump but something about this little one really tipped the scales. We now think that we should resift the dump truck load of sand that's already passed thru our "big" sifter. We have read one account that claims these small points sometimes appear in groups of 6 or 8, normally associated with burials.
Are these small points fairly common? And as usual with all of our shelter finds posts, any help typing these points and tools would be greatly appreciated. The more we research, the more confused we become on this issue.
Is it unusual to find such a wide variety of artifacts in such a small shelter? A few of our previous finds have been identified as Adena and Bakers Creek by Tnet members. Some of the finds remain unidentified as of yet. We now have found three concave base points that seem to defy classification. We found an ID book from the late 1930's that has a photo of concave points found in our area but they are simply listed as "rare but with a wide distribution"
Our total number of points from this one shelter stands at 10, not counting the tools, blades and scrapers. This is way beyond what we imagined would be found.
1320 - cool finds. Finding anything in the winter like this is always a bonus. With regard to screen size I don't have a lot of experience digging but generally the screens I've seen are 1/4" to 5/16" squares. If you're any larger than that then it's very possible smaller points are slipping through (lots of triangles and other arrow points will fit through). As far as the concave base points go it's not an uncommon trait. Obviously many early points share this characteristic but I believe it's common up certainly into middle Woodland times at a minimum.
Thanks for sharing the pics. Keep digging and keep posting.
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Originally Posted by quito
