A connection to the ancient past

      I've been working as a hair stylist for almost...gulp...30 years.  One of the benefits of the job, besides earning enough money to cover food and lodging, has been meeting a wide variety of people that I might never meet on a day to day basis, and getting to have one on one talks with them on a regular basis.  I have learned so much from my clients over the years and am grateful for that contact.

     Recently a client who, like all the others, has been patiently listening to me blather on about fossiling, told me that a friend of hers was clearing out his elderly father's fossiling gear in preparation for the sale of his house (the father, at 90 years old, is still going strong but moving into smaller digs).  I made an immediate phone call to my client's friend and was told I needed to act fast because everything in their garage was going to the curb the next morning.  

     Greased lightening!  I was over there!  And wow!  What an amazing gift!

I took home, for FREE (yay!), stacks of sifting screens, shovels, rakes, gravel probes, a brand new complete heavy wet suit (still had the tags on), a stack of reference books, etc. and, unexpectedly, old cigar boxes filled with broken arrowheads.

     I was told that all the perfect points (the proper term for "arrowheads" as only a fraction of these objects were used with a bow) from his decades of collecting were in his new apartment but I was welcome to the broken ones.  I was already stacking the boxes in my arms as I heard this.  

     Even broken, these are items of beauty.  Sorting through the boxes, I was inspired to watch a YouTube video of someone knapping a point.  It is labor intensive, time consuming, detail oriented work that ultimately depends on the invisible interior structure of the stone. Of course, there was no tv or internet back then and I suppose if you were hungry and just had a rock, you'd have some time to ponder ways to maximize your hunting ability.

     We don't often get a chance to touch something from mankind's ancient past so I've been grateful to have a chance to study, in close detail, a stone tool, made by hand, in a prehistoric environment.  It says everything and nothing.  I love to ponder the mystery of who made it, how it was used, and how it was lost.

     

     I have been drilling holes in some of these fragments and making them into necklaces.  Hopefully I will not be accused of disrespect.  Stone tools were used by all ancient cultures and being able to hold this fragment in my hand gives me a connection to everyone's prehistoric past.