"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.