Regarding the Stone

Moving to Bell County, Texas had several unexpected benefits, and for me one of the most exciting was my proximity to arrowhead hunting... I'm talkin' 'bout in my own back yard!

A worn and ancient spear point, with nine chips or dents.

 I soon learned that they were there because the mesa we lived on was some kind of Native American chert projectile manufacturing site. There were not so many points as there were broken chips and chunks of “flint” rock, strewn in piles all over our property. And there were mostly large skinning tools, makeshift stone implements, and some broken points left laying around. I scoured the property and after a few weeks found a few things that satisfied my arrowhead hunting fantasies.

 A chert knife.

 Part of the process is training the eye.

 

When I flip the ancient tool, its shape suddenly pops.

A large hide scraping tool.

I found some very cool things. And I wanted to share the coolest of all- a real find, a three inch spear point. I found it one evening after considerable searching, when I had stooped over and was scanning the ground at almost ground level. I spied a fairly dusty, nondescript inch-wide nub jammed between two layers of limestone. It was probably nothing. I had pulled scores of similar bits of chert from their primeval burial nooks, just to toss them back into infinity. But when I tugged on this one, it was stuck “fast,” as they used to say, like an ancient tooth in a petrified skull. I took the challenge.

Finally it began to loosen... and as I worked it out of its eternal resting place, it just kept coming... one, two.. three inches! WOW! (See the point above in first photo.)

Almost as quickly as I loudly guffawed, I slumped in disappointment. It was broken. It was chipped- damaged, and basically worthless. I washed it up and tossed it into my “found on the home site” chert collection. Sure it was cool. But I have gotten like so many these days... an intolerant perfectionist. We shouldn't, but we value everything according to what the guys on Antique Roadshow would say. And they would look at it and say “Too bad.”

But then, months later I looked at it again. Having recovered from my disappointment, I really loooked at it. It was large for an authentic Amerind point. And even though it was damaged, it was trying to tell me a story. And when I began to ponder it, I got fascinated. Over the next few months I had several sessions, as the old spearhead and I locked horns. I studied the various chips, the dings, all nine of them, suddenly interested in how they got there. What kind of animal might inflict such damage? There was none except maybe a large wild hog, with huge tusks, that could damage a stone point that much. But they were not imported to Texas until much later when chert weaponry had become obsolete. No, this damage was done in battle.

Someone had repeatedly knocked the large spearhead away, perhaps trying to avoid having to kill the person jabbing with it. Each time they knocked it way, they inflicted serious damage to the edge of the blade. One, two, three, four- five, six times they hit it away, or blocked a jab, each time chipping the stone weapon. Seven, Eight... until both of the “arrowhead” barbs at the base had been knocked off, as well as the very tip, until the once deadly, three-inch blade was now dulled up and down, until the thing was no longer very dangerous... and perhaps in a last desperate lunge, it was impaled into the limestone bluff where it stayed for centuries.

 The angle with which it hit the limestone suggests that it was almost horizontal, probably thrust or thrown from the hip, and obviously, it missed its intended target. It appears when it was attempted to pull it out, the shaft broke off, breaking a tab on the base "tail." This was no possum hunt. 

It was no normal skirmish between opposing tribesmen. Opposing tribesmen did not have anything so effective as the long, sharp tool used to repel this spear. And no Amerind would have been so amazingly accurate while defending himself, to hit an oncoming spear point exactly with his own, so many times. Not even if his life depended on it.

There was one huge ding, a half-inch long, concave pothole in the blade which suggested something sharp and powerful. And something harder than chert. The Amerinds had few metal weapons, except copper, which was rarely used and was not hard enough to chip chert. This effective and debilitating defense was made by a sword, probably in the hands of a Spanish conquistador. This chert blade found in my back yard is the lasting evidence of a forgotten conflict where people probably died, perhaps four or five hundred years ago. And it was not any kind of routine conflict, but one between two vastly different cultures, where one would eventually destroy the other. The men of ships and iron and horses and yes, pigs, would overcome and decimate the men of stone and leather and bison.

 

And that is what this beat-up old arrowhead was trying to tell me. This spear point was driven into the caliche long before the Texans came. Long before the buffalo had been exterminated, the passenger pigeons hunted to extinction. Long before the jaguars retreated along with the Amerinds into Mexico.

And this all made sense. Our bluff, which we know today as “Crescent Mesa,” was a source of chert for tribes in eastern Texas for many millennia. No doubt Amerinds came there from all points east to extract chert and work it into transportable “blanks,” and some camped there and made weapon points and traded them. With little convenient water, none of them stayed very long. But for that reason there were probably often squabbles and skirmishes over access by competing groups to this valuable foothill to the Hill Country. If an eastern party came there to mine the chert and was repelled, it would have to travel even deeper into the hills, which was crawling with hostile tribes, and remove them farther from home and safety. So conflicts on our bluff were probably common. It had been defended many times. 

 

And the mesa and others around it would have been the front line of defense for local tribes, who felt ownership of the bluffs and their wealth of colorful chert. Whoever “owned” the chert hills was on top of the pecking order. And they would be the first people to smite, as they claimed the place the conquistadors would have gone to shut down native weapon production. Yes the Spanish supposedly came in peace and wanted to tell the Amerinds about God, but first on the agenda would have been to try to disarm the population. And that might have been the kind of conflict illustrated by my battered flint projectile; the loser in a historic clash of uncompromising cultures.

Well, now you might understand why a normal, pristine Native American point no longer holds any mystery or much value for me. It is like an unissued military artifact. No story. No action.

Give me a relic with some character. A story to tell. The mystery. There's the value.