Some of our artifacts & shtuff

[ombudsman]

Nearly all this stuff has stories that go with it, but, for the most part, I'll spare you.

The cobble hammer on the left is Anasazi (ancestral Puebloan is, I believe, the PC term now) from S.W. Colorado. The grooved club head is Mogollon (contemporaneous to Anasazi) from west central New Mexico. The pink knife is from Wyoming. The pipe is modern (1970) Red Lake Sioux.

There is a story connected to the pink knife. Wife and I were hunting artifacts on a village site in the foothills of the Bighorn Mts. From this site there is a beautiful view of the towering Bighorns. I sat down for a rest in kind of a natural seat on a big boulder, while my wife continued hunting. I sat there smoking my pipe, enjoying the view. I idly looked at the ground and noticed some flint chippings. As I focused my attention, I realized that the ground right in front of where I was sitting was covered with a half circle of knapping debatage (probably misspelled that.) It struck me like an electric shock that hundreds of years ago some man sat right where I was sitting and worked on stone tools. COOL!

 

[ombudsman]

Here are some Mogollon pottery shards.

 

[ombudsman]

Mogollon pottery and stone tools. As I said, these are from west central N.M.

 

[ombudsman]

The pottery on the left is Mogollon. The shtuff on the right is from the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles.

 

[ombudsman]

All of this stuff is from the Texas panhandle. It is almost exclusively of Alibates "flint" (actually agatized dolomite,) a material so well suited to knapping that it was traded for hundreds of miles around ever since Clovis times.

The two teeth in the lower right corner are obviously not Alibates flint. They are Pleistocene (Ice Age) camel teeth found in a cave in W. Oklahoma.

 

[ombudsman]

The metate is Anasazi, the mano, Mogollon. It is quite a coincidence that the mano, from several hundred miles (and a different, though similar culture) fits the metate almost perfectly.

 

[ombudsman]

Not really artifacts, but...

The baskets are modern Cherokee. The quartz crystal cluster is from Arkansas.

 

[ombudsman]

Ice water crock and demijohn.

 

[Rockhounder55]

I love the painting on the wall in the second to the last photo. They appear to be pioneers heading along the Emigrant Trail. ~Mike

 

[ombudsman]

ORIGINAL: Rockhounder55

I love the painting on the wall in the second to the last photo. They appear to be pioneers heading along the Emigrant Trail.  ~Mike

It's a print of one of Albert Bierstadt's most famous paintings. It's so famous I can't remember what it's titled.