Yesterday, myself and 200 local history nerds spent the evening in a neighbor’s field looking for arrowheads and other Native American artifacts.
Our local historical society has put this event on for years, and this was my third time attending. I know spending hours picking through dirt and rocks sounds pretty tedious, and it is, but it’s also one of my favorite nights of the summer.
The past few years we’ve picked a farm on the top of Pochuck Neck, a sort of knoll that extends north from Pochuck Mountain, in Pine Island, New York.
Hundreds of years ago this knoll was a peninsula surrounded by the drowned lands of the Wallkill river (eventually drained, forming one of New York’s most productive agricultural communities) and settled by native people, attracted by the access to fresh water and wildlife.
Now it’s a field full of soybeans and, every July at least, amateur archaeologists. In the process of tilling the fields for planting, new earth gets exposed, and with that, sometimes treasures from the past too.
In previous years I’ve come home with a handful of chert flakes, the detritus left behind as a by-product of primitive tool making. Neat, but not very impressive.
But this year was productive! Maybe the recent rain helped. I found a complete arrowhead, one nearly finished but likely broken by its maker and abandoned, and two others that were clearly worked but also left unfinished.
Before I pulled them out of the dirt, the last person to touch these rocks did so hundreds of years ago. It’s just a genuinely cool thing to hold in your hand and think about.
