Sunset - June 2, 2020

Sunset - June 2, 2020

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

"A" Is For Artifacts...

Do you sometimes wonder what you would do with your life's direction if you had the opportunity to change career's? I love quilting and might have pursued a certification in quilt appraisals or judging, perhaps. Early on, the field of nursing called to me or to be a librarian. But give me a shovel & other tools and I think archeology would have been the ticket...

Our first house in Wisconsin was located along the Wisconsin River. We inherited the former occupants garden site and the first few summers, it needed a lot of work...clearing out old growth, enlarging and Lots of shoulder jarring roto-tilling by Mr. Outback. Over the span of the seasons, we began to notice numerous amounts of quartz chips in the freshly turned over soil. A close friend of ours, who just happens to have one of the finest arrowhead collections in the entire state, looked things over and said our land was the site of a former Indian village. It made sense, being high on a hill overlooking the river which would have offered excellent navigation by canoe and visibility to the surrounding forest lands. Once while installing pipe for water irrigation, we unearthed an area that clearly showed different colors of strata - signs of a fire pit used for cooking...On rare occasions, the ground would yield up an arrowhead or identifiable parts of one. And one discovery helped to possibly date the village...
A scraping tool used for cleaning hides was discovered closer to the front of the house. Our knowledgeable friend estimated it was about 500 years old. And during the excavation for a new addition to the existing home, I picked up pieces of pottery - and uncovered a tiny stockpile of seeds...
This is my little "collection" of items retrieved...In the center is the scraping tool and surrounding that are the pottery shards and a couple of arrowheads - the tiniest being a bird point with very fine "teeth". 
The small square headed nail is from our present acreage which used to have a homesteader's cabin on it
A few years later, on one of our fishing trips to Canada, by Vermilion Bay in Ontario, we pulled the boat up to a very small island and decided to explore. There were no posted signs.  Walking through hip high grasses, we discovered what was left of an old cabin...roof long gone and walls caved in...glancing down on the rotting floor boards, I spied 2 strange looking wooden objects, partially covered by debris.
These hand carved pieces are used in mending fishing nets. Somehow they had held up as the cabin decayed around them over the decades.
Fossils found along a river bed in Missouri, a variety of rocks collected throughout the Yukon and Alaska...those are my souvenirs and that is my way of touching and connecting with those who have come before me and left their mark. 


"A" is for Artifacts - and is the first letter of Miss Jenny's Alphabe-Thursday as we begin another round. Visit all the other "A" postings.













21 comments:

  1. I had to laugh at this post because I think if I had it all to do over again I would have studied archeology...

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  2. WOW, this sorta hit home... I wanted to dig in the dirt also! And my dad has an extensive arrowhead collection. Love what you found under the cabin too, awesome!

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  3. I love the HGTV show "If Walls Could Talk" (though I think it might not be showing anymore), but from your post it sounds as if gardens talk too. Thanks for a great post...I really enjoyed it.

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  4. What treasures! I love the arrowheads. My father in law collects them.

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  5. I love your post. It's so neat that you've found all those wonderful artifacts. My post this week was also about connecting to the past.

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  6. How exciting to find so many artifacts! I have never been so lucky...or perhaps I have found such items but didn't know it.

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  7. Arrowheads, how neat! I like looking for things on the river banks too but mostly I find lost change and once a submerged fishing rod. Not quite as exciting.

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  8. How cool are they? You are a curator for future generations.

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  9. Love the artifacts! What awesome finds! Very exciting!!!
    Have a wonderful day and thanks for stopping by!
    Coralie

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  10. How wonderful to be able to find these. Very cool.
    Great A word

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  11. Such treasures - great ‘A’ post!

    Have a great weekend too & look forward to *seeing* you again next time,

    Have a great Alphabe-Thursday

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  12. Wow! What an incredibly awesome post! I loved this! You and I would have so much fun together. I'm always on the hunt for something from the past!

    I love the feel of the ingrained stories in my imagination!

    What a wonderful perfect post!

    Totally, totally loved this.

    A++++++++

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  13. Neat stuff. I am always fascinated by anything from the past.

    =)

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  14. a is also for awesome finds come see my a post at http://shopannies.blogspot.com

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  15. That's a wonderful collection of artifacts and a very interesting post.

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  16. How interesting! I, too, love that connection to the past. My connection is through my quilting. Thinking of those women quilting through the drepression years, on the frontier, etc gives me an awesome feeling sometimes. Do you suppose the folks a hundred years from now will care about any of these things? --Lindah

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  17. Hello.
    WoW! What amazing finds!

    Thanks for sharing your collection & for visiting.

    Autumn

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  18. Love your post! Great finds and how fun to come across them unexpectedly :o) I love looking at things from the past and would love to know or imagine the ones and the stories connected with them.

    Blessings & Aloha!
    I am thankful and blessed to keep busy with art orders for Christmas, so have been out of the loop for a few weeks... It is so good to be back in Ms. Jenny's Alphabe-Thursday class!

    Thank you so, so much for stopping by! Oh! We are planning to be up at my dad's for Christmas, so it would be awesome to possibly meet up somewhere with you and your hubby for lunch one day! I haven't been able to do much on the civil war blocks! And I am hoping to do a little smocking before our daughter's baby shower in the beginning of Dec....so much fun things to do!

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  19. Fun post. so cool that you found those treasures.
    I have no regrets being a full time homemaker/stay at home mom to homeschool my children.
    My husband and I have always enjoyed gardening. We talked for many years about farming. We are practicing on the land we are on now to one day be on our 10 acres to begin our hobby farm.

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  20. You have found some wonderful things! It is so lovely to find a connection with the past - which seems so immediate and direct when the artefacts are the things of everyday life.

    Pomona x

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  21. A really interesting post. I love old bits and pieces, they are the amateur historians dream. I love to construct a story around them and imagine the people who used them.

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Your comments are like the chocolate chips in cookies...they make my day!