Site surface observations

[RGINN]

And of course all observations open to different opinions. (No joke in this post) Went back down to the spot near South Park I was at last week to do a little better look over the ground. A few brokes and flakes present but nothin you would care to pick up and take home. The first pic is of the base of a broke of red jasper. (Hope these pics post in order) The second piece of the grey stone that has a diagonal fracture catches your eye as an arrowhead, but it's not. Wrong material, wrong style, and no evidence of intentional flaking upon close examination. The third pic shows where modern day campers built a campfire directly on top of what could have been a cache of red jasper, left for retrieval and use at a later time. (the reddish lookin rocks in the pic) Or maybe just leftovers from tool making. Hard to say, cause the modern fire cracked up the rocks. (Degraded the quality, too) The last pic is a tipi ring. And I apologize for this pic, as you can't visualize it in the pic, so I connected the dots, so to speak. If you were there on the ground you would spot it immediately. Some rocks are sunken quite a bit or hidden by grass in the pics. Some rocks have possibly been removed by campers building fire rings. In the center of the rings is a rock that should indicate a hearth. There's maybe two more in this same area, but hard to say as people have picked them up to build fire rings. The opening of this ring is at the bottom of the pic, and the heavier rocks in the ring are opposite the doorway. It's about 6 feet across, so you could assume it was before acquisition of the horse, as houses got bigger after the horse. The problem I had with this as a tipi ring is that the opening faces due south. In my experience, tipi doors always face opposite the direction of the prevailing winds, which means east where I grew up. Of course, I have been in this area in the fall, the hunting season, and there does seem to be a lot of wind from the northwest. Any opinions welcome.

 

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[old digger]

I would have kept that first (red) one. As for which direction the tepee door faced, I have always understood that they would set up the tepee so the entrance faced the south-east.

 

[RGINN]

I didn't care to keep it od as I got plenty of stuff. It can stay there another thousand years. On the Southern Plains we always set up teepees with the door facing due east. Lot of folk tales about why that is (the morning sun rises and greets us in our lodge, blah, blah, blah) but it was for a practical reason. The prevailing winds there are from the west. The front poles of the teepee stretch out farther, and the back ones go more straight up, so it is stronger against the wind when facing east. Plus the smoke flaps are above the door, and the wind at the back side carries the smoke away. Mine held up to 40mph straight winds one time with no problem. I would think when lodges were smaller it wouldn't make much difference which way they faced, but I guess you wouldn't want the wind blowing in the front door and blowing smoke back down inside.