for the shell of it.

[GatorBoy]

Interesting last few days here.
Thank you to everyone who shared artifacts and info.
I figure I'll add some a bit out of the ordinary artifacts to kinda keep the theme. ..feel free to post your shell artifacts.
Shell drills and perforators.



Shell pendants



Plummets..one shell one pottery







Shell adze and celt tools

 

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[reddirt]

Now I know why you have such a huge shell artifact collection. Awesome area to hunt. I could easily take a few hours just under that tree alone.

 

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[larson1951]

how do all those shells get piled up like that?

are there artifacts mixed with them?

is those the kind of spots where you find all of those shell tools?

must be pretty obvious that i don't know anything about it

 

[GatorBoy]

Those are midden deposits.
Yes artifacts like stone bone and shell tools and even jewelry type items are mixed in with them.
"Trash piles"

 

[tomclark]

Sometimes you can see individual layer/floor and also can see fire pits along the edge and on the bottom. The worked along these row middens and even lived upon them, so home stuff and tools are found in with the food debris, which btw is often ground down I swear on purpose you can't walk on fresh piles of shell and we often find layers and lenses of crushed shell exposed along the edges. These were the kind of places that people hunted for artifacts for a few hundred years, from Paleos to Woodland, but now it's off limits, even after hurricanes. I've seen dozens of trees fall along that beach, palms and cedars. Eastern Red Cedar pretty much only grows on sites around here, along with other midden specific trees and plants like Gumbo Limbo and Spanish Bayonet plants. Along our intracoastal they built many million dollar homes on shell middens, villages just like these pics.

 

[GatorBoy]

Those bayonet plants are very site specific over this way.

 

[tomclark]

Are we amateur ethnobotanists muhaha!


Something recent. I thought it might be a game piece.......

 

[tomclark]

Until I turned it over after getting it home. Partially drilled. Bead Preform.


These two lithics same site, the small microlith drill/perforator/graver could have been like the tool used on the shell.



This unifacial scraper is simple and expedient tool.

 

[GatorBoy]

Thanks Tom.
Were starting to get a nice display of home tools like I call them.
That bead reminded me of a pendant perform I still need to post..microlith too!
I'm up in St. Augustine at the moment.. picking shark teeth off the beach in Vilano.
I found Flint twice yesterday.











This may have had some work on the edge before the ocean wore it away I think.

 

[GatorBoy]

Here is the "almost" pendant.



And one that could be a plummet perform.

 

[larson1951]

i did not know that shell was hard enuff to make those tools
but i eally don't know much about shell stuff in the first place........actually i don't know anything but it sure is cool

 

[GatorBoy]

I need to send you an example of some.
Thick dense and heavy duty conch and whelk is plenty hard enough for wood working and is well documented in the archaeological record as being used for exactly that.

 

[GatorBoy]

Here are a few expedient type stone tools found in with the trash piles over this way.
Household type tools..uniface scrapers,perforators and such.

 

[GatorBoy]

Aww.. man.
Three broken conch shell celt/adze
Poll ends.

 

[GatorBoy]

 

[GaRebel1861]

The first two don't look to be broken in the picture. Matter of fact, they look very nice to me.

 

[GatorBoy]

I will show a couple angles later.
They are what could have beens.
Nice examples though.

 

[GatorBoy]

Here are those two.

 

[rock]

nice gun

 

[GatorBoy]

LOL.
That's what she said.
I didn't notice that was in the photo.
I always say... a peaceful country is first well educated and second..well armed.

 

[tomclark]

Man that's a nice piece the one with no print, fat chunky! You have some of the same but other shells are quite different and thick (Queen conch??), hence they made a lot of that type of adze, using a particular part of the shell for strength and grain. We have the lightning whelk and the horse conch for the big, woodworking, canoe makin' adzes. They took a huge amount of abuse and were reused till broke beyond repair. Canoes, for example, were usually burnt out first but then wham, wham, wham over and over and over to get the material out with an adze. Some adzes were used on logs, bowls and other dry good items, size usually tells, eh?

Check out this massive hafted shell maul, it can be nothing else. Well used and polished. At one time is was probably an adze with a wicked bevel, part of which can still be seen, but the end is bashed like a hammer...and kinda carefully...
This individual busycon is extremely thick and heavy, way more than normal. They picked these robust individuals out for making tools. The only one I've ever found or seen. You should have seen what was sticking out that made me look!!!! One little bit of smoothed lip edge. Woi.