Artifact or...nope?

[Chris717]

Hi, Everyone

I was walking along a tiny feeder stream in the mountains of Dauphin County, PA and found this in the stream. It really stood out because there were no other white rocks anywhere that I saw all day. I thought it was just a piece of quartz, but when I picked it up it felt different than most of the quartz I find around here; it was more uniformly white and the texture of the stone feels smooth and slick, almost like it's covered in lacquer.

I looked more closely at it later and saw what (maybe) appears to be some working done to it. I tried to show this in the pics but it's rather hard with the white stone. The first pic shows the 'flake' that was most apparent to me, and on the outside edge of that are two smaller chips where it flaked off even smaller. Let me know what you think and I appreciate any info you may have. Also let me know if better or specific pictures of a certain part would help. The stone fits in the hand pretty well but I realize that could mean nothing.

My untrained and layman's guess is that it was a master to create points or blades from. I think that's called a blank? I may be wrong.


Thanks for any info you can provide and have a great day!


Chris

 

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[Huzzah!]

Welcome to Tnet!

The word you are looking for is core--a piece of lithic material that has been used to break smaller pieces off of in order to make points, scrapers, etc. out of. I don't think that is a blank--blanks come off of cores.

But give us a picture looking down the edge. From some angles it looks like it could be something with an edge--perhaps a scraper, but most likely a core IMO. Quartz is a deceiving material to take pictures of--as most here know from my own posts.

And I'm pretty sure that is quartz.

 

[Tdog]

Huzzah! is correct. That is a core made from quartz. Many exhausted cores make pretty good scraping / cutting tools. Good eye.

 

[Chris717]

Wow, thank you guys so much! I have been staring at the ground when fishing and hiking for 25 years in the hopes of finding something. Goes to figure that a rock that I picked up because "it was pretty" turns out to be something that was used by Native Americans hundreds of years ago.

I have what I think may be a net weight that I found in the river, I'll post the next time I stumble onto it in my garage.

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Here are the requested pics. Really tough to show the edge with everything being white but this is about as good as I could get. It kind of seems like it has a wedge-like profile but maybe that was just a side effect from how they create the blades and points from it. Thanks again for your guys' help with this.