post your celts

[GatorBoy]

I see several new names.. And some nice artifacts on here as of late.
A conversation about green stone led to a conversation about celts today here... I thought it would make a nice thread to see the variety of material and workmanship of the celts that have been found by members... please add your personal finds.
I say personal finds because that way the emotions of the find are attached to the object the member and to the post in my opinion.

 

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[GatorBoy]

Only complete one I have found along with an almost and my best chipped celt.
<img src="http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=1072116"/><img src="http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=1072117"/><img src="http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=1072118"/>

Looks like that chipped one has had reconstructive surgery

 

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[The Grim Reaper]

I think I remember seeing the Insitu of that one

Not that one. I didn't have my camera with me when I found that. I was actually just doing a recon on how to get access to the Ohio River banks and found some stairs, got permission to use them, and went down to see what the bank looked like and found that within a few minutes as it rolled back and forth in the water. I looked around after that and a buddy and I went back the next day and we found 1 Point, that he found, and very little flint. Several trips to the same spot have produced nothing so it was a very lucky find.

 

[GatorBoy]

I'd feel compelled to go back to that spot here and there regardless.
I can't remember which one it was maybe it was a point.... I remember one photograph having an artifact that looked like it was deep royal blue sticking out of some dirt ...I don't know... I've looked at so many of your awesome insitus.. I can't remember which it was

 

[painterx7]

Nice stuff everyone

 

[yakker]

The only one I have is one my Dad gave me after seeing the hardstone things I'd found. I quote: I knew it was something, but I never knew what... I told him he had a good eye and that it was indeed 'something'- in fact called a celt. But I've never found one. As the 1 and only artifact he ever found- he's never been into it (though very interested and proud of what *I've* found, I value it as much as anything I myself have found. REALLY nice stuff here-- thanks for the thread! Yak

 

[redbeardrelics]

Very nice celt's, adze's, and chisel everyone ! I wish I had a personally found celt to share, but so far only fragments have come my way. The closest I have come to finding one was about 5 years ago when I took an elderly friend on his one and only artifact hunt, at a 70 acre field that contains several sites. We separated and wandered around for a couple hours, and he comes walking back with an intact celt ( although chipped up some), having no idea what it was, and not even being able to relate which area of the field he had found it in

 

[GatorBoy]

Love that one yakker...
That beginners luck never ceases to amaze me red.

 

[joshuaream]

I'm not trying to brag with this post, but I'm always amazed at how rare celts are in some areas, and how common they are in other areas. I have three personally found celts from 30+ years of hunting in Indiana (including years when I was a kid where probably hunted or dug productive sites nearly everyday during the three months of summer and many weekends during the rest of the year when the weather was nice.) I've found more pieces of bannerstones and gorgets than celts or pieces of celts. When I was 10 or so I traded a really nice slate gorget to a local collector for a celt because I hadn't found any at that point.

30 years of hard hunting in Indiana has produced three celts. In my tropical excursions, I probably dug or field walked close to 300 celts in Guatemala back when the window opened and it was legal. And from some of my South American sites I have found around a thousand whole celts, and left many times that number just laying in the fields.

Here are all the broken ones from a single day hunt in a sugar cane field near a Cahokia sized mound and city site. I picked these up last year for another collector to hand out to students in his class, normally I don't even bother to bring them home. I think I found two keepers for me that day.

I know a collector in Louisiana who used to live in Algeria while working for an oil company. He'd go out to some of the neolithic sites in the Sahara to work on the gas wells, and eventually stopped picking up celts unless they were really nice and just picked up points & beads because he could carry more.

 

[yakker]

Holy SMOKES! You're right.... amazing. Yak (I wanted to 'like' your post joshuaream, but I just couldn't )

 

[huntress104]

Here's one that I found while hunting arrowheads in a cleared field. It looks like it is made of limestone. It has a couple of small fossils on one side of it. It is fairly small, 2" wide and 2.25" long. I don't know if you would call it a celt or a wedge??

 

[GatorBoy]

Haha.. Hey Joshua... Are all those celts in a wok?
I've got about 10 one liners ready to go but I think I'll skip all of them..
Poo poo platter?

 

[joshuaream]

Haha.. Hey Joshua... Are all those celts in a wok?
I've got about 10 one liners ready to go but I think I'll skip all of them..
Poo poo platter?

It's a type of copper kettle called a 'paila de cobre' that people used to use to boil down sugar cane juice into a hard brown sugar (aka papelon, pilon, panela, but I don't know the name in English.) They used to be common in the Caribbean and Venezuela where people grew sugar cane. When copper prices were low you could find them in ruins of old sugar mills, or buy them for a couple bucks and clean them up. Now 30lbs of solid copper is worth better than 100 bucks and the bulk of them have been melted down.

I've got a couple of them and usually keep bulk rocks stored in them.

 

[GatorBoy]

Nice look.. Good to see you posting thank you for stopping by

 

[tomclark]

Posted these before, no new pics, LOL






This chipped adze was found associated with shell adzes like the ones above. Same size and shape. Not a preform.

 

[redbeardrelics]

Here is my smallest celt.

Hey Quito and Gator, I have questions about "Greenstone"? I noticed Quito's celt looks to have small greenish specks in it, and the second photo of Gators celts looks kinda green as well. I am unfamiliar with greenstone, and was wondering if either or both of your celts shown are greenstone, and what else you could tell us about it? Thank you.

 

[rock]

This one is Greenstone I bought it this year from a antique store. The mineral deposits on it show as tiny brown spots. I don't have it anymore I gave it away to a member at the last show who admired it.

 

[GatorBoy]

Greenstone is really just a generic term for igneous rock that acquired a green color from minerals in the ground.
Quito's celt looks like a type of granite to me.
I didn't find this one but know who did here in Florida ..it's a good example of what we call greenstone down here.. The material likely came from somewhere in Georgia... Sometimes referred to as Savannah River green stone.. It's really a basalt type material.

 

[GatorBoy]

Those are killer like always Tom... no new pics ...lol.
I never was able to find a whole one of this type of adze.

 

[sandchip]

The closest I ever come to finding a celt is this lil' shrunk thang. Just big enough to make you mad. The cone is made from the poll end of a broke one. Dug the Arredondo (or SR) not two inches from where I found the cone. Both come out of a dirt road that had just been scraped. You can see where the scraper just caught the left edge of the cone in the picture of the bottom.

 

[GatorBoy]

Those are awesome I would probably call that one a chisel its crazy looking almost looks like asphalt