Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Indian Artifacts

Here are a few from my collection gathered around Hebgen Lake, Montana. My mother and I spent many early Springs looking for these artifacts where Indians must have spent years hunting and gathering. It is interesting the different materials that ended up here and realizing that obsidian was the most common material and basalt had to come from somewhere else.

The knife on the left is complete and wonderfully made, again material from somewhere other than Hebgen Lake area. The obsidian point nest to the knife is finely formed and more typical of later Indian influence.

The Basalt piece is indicative of a hafted knife and made from basalt. I found it on a gopher mound over a mile from the lake. The next obsidian point is not broken or mis-shaped, it is actually a rare type of parallel plane on both cutting surfaces with some design meant for a particular purpose. It has been so long since we studied and had these artifacts cataloged, I forgot a lot of the genesis of these pieces.

The bottom piece is an actual flint from a flint-lock rifle that has been converted to a scraper by an Indian and used more recently in regards to Indian history. All of our artifacts were used by the impact study done when they were looking at "Ski Yellowstone" a proposed ski area to be built near Hebgen Lake in the early 1970's...