killerv: You were looking along the Ocmulgee River in central Georgia. I used to look near the Oconee River in Milledgeville. There were big corn fields next to the river, just wait for them to plow them in April, and then wait for it to rain, and the fields were just covered with broken pieces of pottery and flint flakes. It was easy to imagine big Indian villages in those fields south of Milledgeville. I picked up some nice points there as well as a nearly intact axe head.
My buddies were looking right in the Oconee River, on a sand bar right in Milledgeville, and they found a clay pipe. It was a figure of a duck and was about 4 inches long. They told me it was just beautiful, museum quality. But before I got a chance to see it, one night they were smoking pot with it and dropped it on the kitchen floor and it shattered into 300 pieces.
At that same spot in Milledgeville, right where the highway crosses the river, one day I was going by there and I saw an RV parked there, and some guys with scuba gear. I went down to investigate. These guys were getting cannon balls. They had studied up, that the state Armory was in Milledgeville in 1864, and when Sherman took over the town, they loaded up 800 cannon balls into a wagon, and took it to the bridge over the river, and threw all the cannon balls into the river.
These cannon balls were about 3 inch diameter and 7 inches long.
These guys had a big inner tube with a mesh floor and a big suction hose, they vaccuumed up all the mud on the bottom of the river, the water about 9 feet deep there, and the cannon balls would land on the mesh floor of the inner tube. These guys had about 300 of these cannon balls and they said they planned to get all 800 of them. They said that one cannon ball was worth $350.
Also they had a beautiful Bowie knife, and a beautiful flint spear point about 7 inches long that they had vaccuumed up from the river bottom.
