Archaic soapstone vessel?

[discoidal roller]

This piece has been on display at the ranger station in Seneca Creek State Park, Maryland for several years. No one on staff really knows anything about it, except that it was found within the park within the past 20 years. Perhaps a roughed out pigment bowl? ideas?

https://imgur.com/eeC5v7u
https://imgur.com/J9m8xeF

 

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[quito]

Small mortar maybe?

 

[Old Pueblo]

Yes, Id say its some kind of crude bowl for something. I couldnt say what though. It looks man made.

 

[Old Pueblo]

Maybe its a nutting stone ore something like that. Like a mortar, as quito suggested.

 

[sandchip]

May just be me, but it looks more like petrified wood than soapstone. Did they let you pick it up and look it over?

 

[redbeardrelics]

Interesting piece? it looks to me from the photos that it may have been a preform, not finished, or used much. Those soapstone outcroppings and resource areas have also been scrounged repeatedly from pre-history to present times. I knew a man who did soapstone art sculptures out of pieces about that size, and it looks like a piece he could have found, tested for suitability, and decided to discard and look for something better. That piece looks sorta freshly removed or retrieved from an outcropping, with that angular petrified wood look it has, rather than smoothed over by thousands of years of exposure to climate and geology?

 

[Plumbata]

Years ago I collected some of that MD soapstone (with hard black inclusions) and it is exceptionally soft material, so while it could have been done in ancient times from the looks of it the piece was idly carved sometime recently with a rock pick for no particular purpose other than to play with the material, which wouldn't have taken more than a few minutes. It doesn't really look like provenanced pre-columbian soapstone/steatite preforms or finished pieces either.

 

[Charl]

It is likely soapstone. However, when fashioning something like vessels, such as soapstone bowls, the natives usually began crafting the bowl form right in the outcrop. Then they pried the blank off the outcrop. As seen in these two photos. The first is a soapstone outcrop showing the still attached ancient forms, and the second a blank found in a field a few miles from the quarry.....

 

[rock]

Thats a neat example Charl