Print this story |
E-mail story |
This story has 14 comments Add your own |
iPod friendly | Bookmark this
What is this?
photo by Steve VanGunda
David Snow shows off his most prized discovery, a 16th century Irish arrowhead he found while on vacation to Ireland in 2001. He handles it with special gloves to preserve its history.
Trio hunts arrowheads for weekend
Published Tuesday, August 5, 2008
WOODVILLE — During the week you’ll find David Snow sitting quietly behind a desk at his accounting office, but on the weekend he is trekking through fields and streams looking for buried treasure.
No, he’s not secretly Indiana Jones, but he does share in the character’s enjoyment of finding things left behind by our ancestors.
“I started arrowhead hunting almost four decades ago” Snow said. “It’s something I did with my dad, and now I can also do with my son, Travis.”
This last weekend had the potential to be very exciting for father and son. The pair, along with family friend Levi Steisman, were heading back out to a location close to Clark Creek Natural Area in Wilkinson County that is rumored to be an old hunting camp.
“We’ve found arrowheads in this area before, usually after a nice hard rain,” Snow said. “Sometimes you can find them laying out in the open along creek beds after a rainstorm. Other times, if you’re lucky, you can find broken ones out in freshly plowed fields.”
So they set out, shovels and screens in hand, hopefully to find lost treasures. It would be a two-pronged search, one at the rumored camp and the other along the creek. Hopefully one of these sites would yield a nice find. After hours of digging and sloshing through the creek they were successful. Travis had found two intact arrowheads, and Levi had found three partial ones.
“Sometimes it’s your lucky day, and sometimes its not,” Snow said. “That’s part of the excitement of searching.”
Southern Mississippi isn’t the only place Snow has found his treasures. He’s unearthed arrowheads in Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, Arkansas and Oklahoma, as well as Ireland.
“Most of my collection is made up of flint arrowheads, but my most valuable one is made of iron,” Snow said. “I found it seven years ago while visiting a friend in Ireland. He’s also an avid arrowhead collector.”
Returning home, David and Travis add their newly acquired pieces to an already large collection. Among the pieces of flint, Snow’s prized find isn’t hard to miss because it looks nothing like the rest of his collection. Like a museum curator, he handles the little lump of metal delicately with cotton gloves. After all, you must be careful with something almost 500 years old.
“I had the arrowhead dated maybe four years go,” Snow said. “The museum in Ireland says it’s an arrowhead from the 16th century. It really is a once and a lifetime find.”
Comments
Posted by motown (anonymous) on August 5, 2008 at 9 a.m. (Suggest removal)
YEA...
Posted by grrbrts (anonymous) on August 5, 2008 at 9:37 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Great find! Hope you come across a mother lode.
Posted by Yeahuhuh (anonymous) on August 5, 2008 at 9:42 a.m. (Suggest removal)
This is a very fun activity that quite a few people around here have at least a little interest in.
Walking down the creeks and in plowed fields to pick up items on the surface has been done for a long time in the area -- more when fields were plowed back when we actually grew our own food and fiber. It helps focus awareness on what has been and what has changed when you actually go to find them yourself. The soil in this area is moving all the time.
Actually, though, digging in village sites IN PLACE, where the artifacts were originally deposited is a bit destructive when you have a site that dates from an ancient culture, and digging up the collectibles destroys the context and all the knowledge we could gain from the find. When the finder passes, the artifact becomes just another arrowhead worth a few dollars, generally given away to someone who knows nothing of it. If you just choose to look somewhere where destruction is not imminent, it is better and the sites are usually safe for a long time that way.
Archaeologists can find pollen samples, do dating, type the pottery that comes with these, and most importantly record the site and work on it if it is rare. They publish what they find, and this is the most important thing. Unless you are digging burials, they have no right to your finds, so telling an archaeologist about your finds is usually a good thing, whether you dig or not.
In this state there is nothing to keep a landowner from digging artifacts or allowing it on his land EXCEPT and unless the site is a burial site. Removing, commercing in or otherwise collecting burial goods is accordingly illegal in the state and you can never know until an assessment is made whether your hole is sunk into a burial.
In fact, the more, and the more spectacular the stuff you find the more likely your hole is sunk into a burial site. Bones decay within a few hundred years and so are not present intact in most of the native burials in the Natchez area.
The Grand Village has a lot of information about the history and the 12,000 year old prehistory of this area. Anybody that likes to find artifacts should love learning about how old they are and which culture made them.
Posted by commander (anonymous) on August 5, 2008 at 11:10 a.m. (Suggest removal)
yeahuhuh, maybe you're the one I should ask....years ago I found what I believe to be a piece of a spear head. It is too large to be an arrow head. It was found in a freshly plowed field in Hamburg, just outside of Roxie. Where could I go to get it dated?
Posted by Yeahuhuh (anonymous) on August 5, 2008 at 11:51 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Jim Barnett at the Grand Village sometimes has time to look at an artifact, and the Natural Science Museum in Jackson regularly sponsors identification meetings. Maybe you could take a scan or a photo and send it to one of these institutions. Dating stone artifacts can be tuff but is sometimes possible. Pottery or some types of stone artwork can be easier to date.
The Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson should also have archaeologists who can help identify stuff. If you put an artifact on a flat-bed scanner you can get incredibly detailed images to email for an id.
Most of what people call arrowheads are actually from spears or special darts and are far older than arrowheads. They say the bow didn't come into use much till AD times, and that arrowpoints are tiny things most often. But Indians had been dropping points for many thousands of years by then. Most of the points that are not arrow points from around here are 2 to 4 thousand years old, some nearly 10,000 years old.
Archaeologists look at the shape of the base and the way it was made to come up with approximate dates for stone artifacts, but some styles were used for a very long time. They might even have a book at the Grand Village.
Posted by middenisblackgold (anonymous) on August 5, 2008 at 2:20 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Many people do not realize that this kind of activity not only destroys parts of our unwritten history, but it can also be illegal. There are Federal and State laws that protect archaeological sites, all of which have fairly large fines and the possibility of jail time. If you would like to gain a little knowledge about the archaeology of Mississippi and some of the laws surrounding it, please read the book Mississippi Archaeology Q&A by Dr. Evan Peacock. It is a very interesting read.
One thing I noticed this family does that I feel is VERY wrong is they actually DIG for the artifacts. Creek walking and walking agricultural fields is much less destructive than actually digging holes and screening the dirt like you are an actual archaeologist. When archaeologist do that they measure depths, make notes on soil types, record what levels the artifacts are being recovered from and then put that information into a report that can be referenced in the future. By not doing this you are throwing out any other information that could have been recovered.
Legaly you need the written permission from the land owner to remove artifacts from the property. Also, it is illegal to remove any artifacts from any State owned land, Federal lands, or any other "public land".
So, if you are going to collect artifacts, please respect our past and the history of America by NOT DIGGING for artifacts and please follow the laws that have been passed to help save our unwritten history.
Posted by redusmfan (anonymous) on August 5, 2008 at 3:14 p.m. (Suggest removal)
That sounds like a lot of fun....Good luck hunting
Posted by Yeahuhuh (anonymous) on August 5, 2008 at 3:57 p.m. (Suggest removal)
"Midden" offered something that I did not stress, and that is that although landowners can give you permission to hunt artifacts on their property, hunting on state, federal and "public" lands is not OK, with the rarest of exceptions. Even though there are a great many places that law enforcement would not stoop to prosecuting you for picking up something from a gravel bar, there are places you could get into trouble by doing it.
Here is something else that is not OK legally, and that is walking a creek that is a property boundary along much of it's course and picking up whatever you find on the assumption that it is yours.
Most of the streams that can be walked are not considered navigable streams, and even if they were, ownership of artifacts, fossils, etc goes to the landowner that owns the adjacent or riparian land -- most often even extending into the creek along it's bottom. If you do it without permission you are stealing.
Of course a great many landowners could care less and would primarily be worried about you suing them if you hurt yourself. But the law says they own the stuff. Even using a bona fide navigable stream only entitles you to navigation passage.
So yes, the primary narrow exception that makes it OK to even pick up an arrowhead is permission from the landowner.
Technically, a bulldozer pushing a thousand of them into obvilion is OK, and truthfully there is relatively little money allocated for proper archaeology, but the law prevents you personally in many places from picking one up that would be lost forever otherwise.
This network of law keeps a great many archaeological finds from ever being reported to the proper authorities, so that the sites could be evaluated. Some of the best archaeologists therefore take great pains to befriend amatuers and get to look at their finds, and in doing so they sometimes do more and better work for society than the legal sticklers. Since people have enjoyed looking for artifacts since before clocks were made there is no chance at all that legal prohibitions will stop artifact collecting by individuals.
If you are one of the many who hunt these things make sure you have permission from the property owner. I would not try to talk people out of hunting fossils, artifacts and the like in the ditches and exposures around their homes as to do so would doom a great many sites and artifacts to being concreted over, bulldozed and lost forever.
Posted by oldsaw (anonymous) on August 5, 2008 at 4:24 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Sounds like great fun.
Posted by freedom42 (anonymous) on August 5, 2008 at 4:41 p.m. (Suggest removal)
About 20 years ago some people I knew had a write up in the ND about this same thing. They were fined and all their artifacts were taken by the Ms Dept. of Archives and History. They were digging and collecting on St. Catherine Creek near the Indian Village as well as on the Trace and other places.
Posted by redusmfan (anonymous) on August 5, 2008 at 8:15 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Freedom, that is why many people do things like that undercover....on the sly, as it is called....They do not tell anybody where it comes from. If they are asked, they say it was uncovered on person property, not public lands...
Posted by rattlesnake (anonymous) on August 6, 2008 at 9:09 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Hunting artifacts is very fun and relaxing, but getting permission to be on peoples land can be very hard. I hunted artifacts every chance I got when I was able to. Some of the best times I ever had. As far as identifying stone tools points and pottery you can find plenty of books on this.
Posted by grrbrts (anonymous) on August 7, 2008 at 12:16 a.m. (Suggest removal)
I enjoyed watching Mississippi Outdoors a few months ago, that featured a man that collected relics from creeks. Or, the right-up about a gentlemen finding a missing (deceased) female, that had been missing for quite some time, while creek walking. Yet, another right-up about a gentlemen finding a missing (deceased) husband, that was found in a creek, after having ran off the road while driving a truck, and was reportedly missing for two days and fifteen hours.
Posted by grrbrts (anonymous) on August 9, 2008 at 11:21 p.m. (Suggest removal)
I tried donating my collection of creek found relics, but was told that since they were out of context, they could not except them, and that they had to have been excavated. Picking up a rock in a creek bed is not Archaeology. On another note, the law states that disturbing a creek bed is illegal, but isn't that quite a BROAD clause? Sounds like a catch-22 to me.
Post a comment (Terms of Use Policy)
(Requires free registration.)