A Nice Surprise

I was monitoring again today on the bluffs overlooking the Potomac, where the trees are just starting to put out leaves. The point of monitoring is actually avoid discovering things; theoretically one only allows monstrous machines to dig in places where either nothing is really expected or you have already cleared it out of the way. 

But today, standing around watching the slow place of outfall reconstruction, I found this in a bit of soil churned up by caterpillar treads. It's a javelin or dart point, maybe about 5,000 years old.

And when I moved on to a different site a few hundred yards up the road I found myself surrounded by artifacts. This stuff was all outside the work area, so it was all left in place. This point is hard to date because the shape is such an obvious one for a dart point, but at least 1500 years old and likely more than 5,000.

The forest floor in this area was scattered with flakes of a kind of stone archaeologists call rhyolite. Rhyolite is interesting because it occurs only in certain, limited areas, and the closest rhyolite sources to Washington, DC are at Catoctin Mountain, about 70 miles away. The people who lived around the Falls of the Potomac between about 500 BC and 800 AD really loved rhyolite, used it over all other stones. I subscribe to the theory that says this means their territory extended as far as Catoctin Mountain, and that their seasonal round took them at least that far every year. (Besides the stone, there are camp sites not far from Catoctin with pottery identical to that found along the Potomac in DC.)

So it turned out to be a pretty good day.