Need help with identification

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nic6

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View attachment 223003View attachment 223004
Sweet find. Found this metacarpal in an Arkansas River sand bar a few years ago. Pretty sure it’s a big ass bear. Rivers around here all drain from the lower Rockies, so you never know what you’ll find.
Ha. Pretty sure it's a petrified weiner!

But seriously, that got me thinking about a fairly decent rocky hollar/ravine on my property. Who knows what's down in it.
 

nic6

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An atlatl doesn't have a point. An atlatl is the stick one uses to throw a spear.
View attachment 222951

The stick in his hand is the atlatl. It effectively lengthens ones throwing arm, to generate more speed on the missile.
Damn you got me on that one. Guess I should have put the word spear/dart in there also. Good catch.
 

dennishoddy

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Don't you just wish things like that could talk?
Absolutely. Possibly 3800 years old. Who sat around the campfire knapping it?
How did they learn that heat treating the chert would make it easier to work?
I have learned through reading that the Oklahoma Kay County chert was highly saught after by other tribes. It was great trading material for the locals.
Tribes from the northern states brought copper to trade which made knapping much easier that the old methods as I understand.
If Neanderthal has anything to add or correct, it would be appreciated.
 

Neanderthal

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Absolutely. Possibly 3800 years old. Who sat around the campfire knapping it?
How did they learn that heat treating the chert would make it easier to work?
I have learned through reading that the Oklahoma Kay County chert was highly saught after by other tribes. It was great trading material for the locals.
Tribes from the northern states brought copper to trade which made knapping much easier that the old methods as I understand.
If Neanderthal has anything to add or correct, it would be appreciated.

Antler and stone was used to knap it rather than copper. Although copper from the Great Lakes region was utilized by the Old Copper Culture up to 6,000'ish years ago, it wasn't used to knap with as much as modern knappers do. Antler and stone was preferred. Copper was brought to Oklahoma as trade goods, but primarily by the Misssissippian groups. Quite a bit of copper was found in Spiro Mounds in LeFlore County.

Here's an axe that we have at the museum (It's currently on loan to the Cowboy Museum in OKC for a traveling Spiro exhibition). It's a woodpecker effigy, meant to be either a pileated, or the now-extinct Ivory Billed Woodpecker with the mouth open. The handle is made from Persimmon wood and the bit is made from copper, it has shell inlaid for the eyes. This was found in a cache, in a woven mat container, in the central mound (Craig) by Pocola Mining Co. diggers in 1935.


spiroaxe.jpg
 
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dennishoddy

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Ok, out on the friends airboat again today prowling sandbars.
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Found a couple of things of interest.
As I’ve been told, the two items on the right side of the pic are the outer enamel of prehistoric bison?
The cylindrical object on the left is petrified. Very hard.
I called it a petrified Dino turd when first looking at it, but with the pattern on the outside, being perfectly round, with the little protruding object on one end, it looks more like an intestine?
@Neanderthal

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dennishoddy

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So prior to napping the flint they would heat it up to make it work easier?
Yes, heat treating makes it flake better and easier to shape. I used to knap arrowheads years ago.
They would stack the flint in a fire pit, build a big fire around it, and then cover with dirt to create an oven. Open it up in a few days when it cools down, and it's done. They did it for centuries so I'm sure they had it down to an art.
When I did it, we heat treated the flint in an electric oven at work over a 24 hour period to heat and allow to cool slowly.
Edit: These are some tiny bird points I knapped when doing that. Size of a dime up to a quarter.
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hunter966

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Yes, heat treating makes it flake better and easier to shape. I used to knap arrowheads years ago.
They would stack the flint in a fire pit, build a big fire around it, and then cover with dirt to create an oven. Open it up in a few days when it cools down, and it's done. They did it for centuries so I'm sure they had it down to an art.
When I did it, we heat treated the flint in an electric oven at work over a 24 hour period to heat and allow to cool slowly.
Edit: These are some tiny bird points I knapped when doing that. Size of a dime up to a quarter. View attachment 223931View attachment 223931
That’s pretty awesome, looks like you had it down pat.
 

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