Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Indian Artifacts

Having poked around the outdoors my whole life , I've stumbled onto a number of finds over the years.

My modest bowl collection.


Seems the kids are always turning up arrow heads.



You guys have any good stuff to share?

Nice obsidian.
I have a few things but no pictures.
Mostly Bird points and a few fetish items.
The mano and metate collection is nice too.

Ps,
All of these are from private property making them legal in California.

>You guys have any good stuff to share?

I have some info to share. If you picked up, or dug up, that stuff from public land you're guilty of several felonies. Just one would cost you your gun rights.

my grandmother has or had a bunch of hammerstones and arrow points, infact there are tipi rings off of what used to be their north fields.....but after 2 generations looking over their property before i came along ive never come across anything...

anymore i hunt mainly public lands, havent seen any native artifacts but im looking at my feet as much as up looking for deer or such....where i normally hunt is part of the Hell Creek Formation and is full of dinosaur fossils, lots of cool stuff has been found by hunters out there but i havent been lucky enough to stumble on anything yet.....cant collect vertebrate fossils off public land but i can get credit for finding it

Indians camped along the creek that runs through the little valley where I live.
The creek runs right through my back yard.

Most of the neighboring ranches have camps on their property.
Every winter a lot of new stuff seems to come to the surface.

Again all perfectly legal due to the fact that it is private ground.

The only artifacts around here are empty bottles.

Nice finds

sal, we don't see much obsidian around here. Most of the stuff here is petrified wood. I found these points on a jobsite while framing a house. The owner didn't want them....



This thumb scraper was found in a driveway at a ranch. People had to have walked over it a bazillion times in the last 150 years....


I also found a slightly more modern artifact while remodeling the same ranchhouse. A Henry copper cartridge that had multiple firing pin hits, stuffed in a crack of the 1870's log house.....Maybe failed during an injun fight?.....

Arrowheads are legal to pick up.

Private property artifacts are legal to pick up, no skeleton and burial objects now.

Artifacts are legal to own that were obtained legally at the time of discovery, many laws have changed over the years and proving illegal discovery would be hard on a 800 year old object in your house.

Kent

Interesting thread. Before we became such a PC country looking for artifacts was great clean fun. As a boy I spent many a Spring and Summer day walking the creek and river side fields of corn in NE Iowa collecting them. Then in the early 1960's we spent nearly the full summers for 3 years on the shores of the Missouri digging the villages north of the Oaha dam.
But my greatest find is a dinosaur, let me give you the exact location...40 miles NE of Jordan Mt....That should narrow it down a bit. Really neat to find one. I found it while Antelope hunting. Its on BLM land so I didn't take any of it and I have told no one of its exact location. Really fantastic to find.

Guys, you might google "Dalton Hunter". He is one of my best friends for years, and lives in SW MO. I have always kidded him about his pointed rocks. I can give you a ph# if it's not on his site. His opening pic from Table Rock lake in the 1960's is hanging on my wall. Good luck.

Here are a few I found by Hebgen Lake. We used to go there every spring and hunt the beaches where the water was low and we found dozens of artifacts.

The top casing was actually found not far from Reno-Benteen battle site, down on the Little Bighorn river. It is a 50-70 casing.

The other casing is a 45-70, found on the beach by Hebgen Lake. Notice how the case mouth is smashed, something that whites were told to do with fired casings so that Indians couldn't reuse the case.

The large implement is a knife found in the same area. The square implement is a flint from a flintlock rifle that an Indian had converted fro use as a scraper.

Here some my father found, in Tenn. as a boy plowing behind a mule!The one with the silver chain, my Grandfather found as a boy in southern Ill. the native american that wraped the silver around it said, it was big Med. as it has blue veins running thru it!
John

I live on a road known to be an old indian trail. When I was a kid I found a few arrow heads while helping my dad farm. Here is an axe head I found while woodchucking a few years ago

My Great Grandmother gave me this stone axe head when I was a kid. I've been told by a collector that it was the biggest one [of that type], that she'd ever seen.



She also gave me this piece. It's basically just a flat volcano type rock that I was told was a cornmeal grinder or something to that effect.



Although this isn't exactly an artifact, I've always liked it. I found it on a hill top in Kansas. It's some type of coral.

I've picked up a bunch of arrowheads in South Texas but nothing really over an inch long. I've seen them in ranch houses, big spear heads but I've never seen them.

I once walked down a sendaro for about 300 yards and it came up the lightest rain in the world for about 5 minutes. I turned around to walk back to the truck and I musta picked up or saw about 50 arrowheads that just seemed to pop up after the rain that I missed just minutes before. Wierd.

I've never found one here in East Texas or Louisiana where I used to live but vegetation grows up so fast. What I do find here in East Texas every year when I run the turning plow thru the ditch to clear it out is a bunch of shark teeth.

Yeah, ground cover here in east Texas is a killer to finding stuff. Not much row cropping to expose it anymore either.

I have some stuff I found over the years. Had a really nice Caddo pipe I found cute little thing had a shallow bowl @ inch in diameter on top of a lump of clay that had a bear?Dog? wolf?something on the front. Back had a hole for a reed stem.

I professor from Steven F Austin that I showed it to talked me into lending it to him to study. I guess he is still studying it because that was forty some years ago and I have never gotten it back.

Ended my co-operation with professional archeologists.

Prize of my modist collection is a clovis type. A couple of archelogy pros that have seen it wanted it bad and said it was authentic. I still have it.

Found a few burials but our Indians were poor as job's turkey. Nothing there but bones. You can see them but you can't excavate them. Touch them and they crumble due to the soil being so acid. I won't tell anybody where they are.

BCR

I went out the front door of our cabin in Central Oregon one morning to find two real Indians standing by my truck. We were going hunting.

I threw them back. Thought about keeping them but the ate way too much.


Man I miss those guys, they were keepers.