Found While Farming Thru The Years

John B.

Well-known Member
Here's are a few pictures of what we've found thru the years in Illinois while farming and when we use to hoe corn out of the beans. The last picture that I have my finger pointing at a piece that reminds me of an old walking plow.
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Mu uncle found several stone hammers on his farm about 3 miles from the Red River in ND. Our farm was 8 miles from the river, we only found one stone hammer in all the years that we looked.

We did find a couple of rocks that were hollowed out from grinding some kind of seeds. We were picking rocks at the time and placed them alongside a rock pile; when we went back to get them a few days later they were gone.
 
I found a dollar bill.

A love letter from one of my classmates of a few years ago to her boyfriend.

2 pages from a bondage magazine.

a 1/2 an oxen shoe.

--->Paul
 
Very nice collection, John. I imagine there are likely still a lot of those artifacts lying in fields but we are not as likely to find them as our forebears did walking behind the horses.
 
My FIL Orville Sommer found arrowheads & hatchet or what ever the one you have dated, just north of Gibson City, IL. a few miles. He has passed away a few yrs ago & we got part of his collection. He told me once, can you believe a Indian was the last one to touched this ,before I found it.
 
Although there were certainly native peoples in this area, we have little to prove it. My dad found a broken arrowhead, I"ve found nothing, and we, between us ahve held this farm since 1945.
 
Nice collection, I have a collection about like that, picked up on the fields near the Ky. river. Mostly cultivating with a super A and a one row cultivater, now and then when cutting tobacco. We don't see as many now but we have been plowing these fields for a hundred or so years now. A young man found an arrowhead dateing back to the Adena people, much older than the arrowheads that I have found. I guess I just passed them over.
 
I live on a Chickasaw village site. Since no-till planting, don't find so many artifacts. Now find them in cow paths, bank erosion, planting rose bushes in the front yard, etc. Any place there is bare ground. Found several stone hammers but none as polished as that one. Prize find is a stone used as the top stick holder for a bow-and-stick fire starter.
 
We had a stone here for the longest time that was shaped kinds like a bullet. About a foot high when you stood it up on end,square at the bottom for about two inches. Sure didn't look like anything natural. Dad set it shallow in a concrete slab one time and it got broke off where it went from square to round.
 
Most of the world's peoples had entered the Bronze Age by about 5000 years ago and the Iron Age about 3000 years ago.
But not in the Americas.
The natives here were still a Neolithic (Stone Age) culture when the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock.
I've always been curious.
Why?
 
thoes are some good finds. Think what you missed. Dad has a few indian grinding bowls, and the stones used to grind corn in them. Indian rocks' or arrow heads are death to building ccntractors. If found on the sight it involves a search by archaeologists to catalog all finds The contractor pays all the time spent until everything is found. You don't even want to find a bone. Stan
 
Those are some very nice pieces. There's a lot to be said for looking down at your feet. After a good rain there is a lot that can be found if one will just take the time to look. Here is a small part of what my grandfather found on the Mississippi county farm. He gave most of it to Arkansas State University and the University of Arkansas archeology department did a dig on the farm.

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In Europe and Asia you had different groups who were constantly working to find better ways to do things so they would be more advanced then their neighbors. There was some metalworking going on in the Americas, for example Aztec gold, but not for major use.
 
I have a large collection like that, mostly from the farm here, and some from the Susquehanna hills and islands. They're kind of neat to find. I was running fertilizer one day and stopped to check how much I had left. I looked down as I climbed off the tractor and spotted one. As I picked it up, I spyed another, and then another laying about a foot away. From stories from the nephew of the old owner, there was an encampment near a spring on the back end of the place. I don't see as many now- we haven't plowed in over 20 years with no-til.
 
The one I found looks exactly like your fourth picture. Only thing I have found so far. Well at least that is old. Many cultivator feet, horseshoes and that kind of modern stuff.

Rick
 
Stan,
BTDT was on one job site where Myself, the forman and another guy dug out a very large and old leg? bone. We stopped and looked at it and the foreman saw some other people coming our way. He told me to get my butt back in the trackhoe while he put it in my bucket and I swung it and the dirt in the bucket into an articulated dump and off it went before anyone else saw it. A couple years later I was working for another contractor on an expansion job at the campus of U-of-Albany NY setting in a Case super K with a wide ditch bucket scratching an inch of soil at a time while a 4 man crew of araclogists with trowels recovered human bones to relocate their remains to another site. Did that for 5 months and was paid prevailing rate. Nice easy work, but very boreing. On a good day I may have moved 10yd of dirt. The area was said to be a buarial site for deralects that migrated to the Port of Albany during the Revolutionary War period. I don't know who was footing the bill, but we were on a deadline to finish, so site construction could progress. During WWI an Army Depo was constructed on the site. Quanset buildings for storage, etc. When they leveled the land many wooden caskets were disturbed. We found bones and remains of shattered caskets spread all across the site, with very few intact caskets with complete bodies in them
Loren, the Acg.
 
Bob,
Silence is an unsaid rule in the construction business if you want a paycheck. As Stan said, some of the smallest finds can bring a major construction project to a complete hault for unknown periods of time. If a contractor doesn't have enough work to shift the crew on that site to another, the workers are out of a job until the site is cleared and construction can resume.
Loren
 
My dad had a pretty good collection of arrowheads when he farmed. One or 2 stone hammers and he even found a pipe. He could be driving along with the A JD and stop and hop off and pick up an arrow head while digging or dragging in the spring. Some Indian graves on a hill not far from where he farmed.
 
Very interesting question, UDog, and I'd bet no one has the exact answer. I've wondered many times how the first humans made those first steps toward the development of "technology", primitive though they might have been. Even an individual's imagination had no existing frame of reference. Nothing seemed possible because nothing had been done.

Think of all the simple devices and processes that we take for granted, e.g., a hammer and a nail. A sharp cutting edge. A length of rope. Even the fabric in our clothes.

When fire was recognized as a "tool", firewood was limited to the dead wood already on the ground. There was no way to cut a new supply. Metal, if found in a raw form, had to be used in that raw form because of no way to melt it, nothing to melt it in. Even cooking was limited to holding something over a fire with a stick. How you gonna boil water to make a stew?

I don't know if I'm making any sense here, but back to your original question, why not here? The answer may be that the native Americans simply never stumbled into those first revolutionary processes that opened the way for successive developments. In those parts of the world where those developments did happen, it may have been the result of nothing more than a series of fortuitous happenstances. In other words, just plain dumb luck.

But what do I know?
 
Neat pictures. The land we are on was once one of the largest indian settlements in the US. These were some of the first indians to settle in the eastern US. When the ground use to be plowed everyone would come and pick them over. Going to try this year and see if I can find some this year.
 
While I was young I found several arrowheads while creeping along cultivating just emerging beans and corn. Haven't found any in decades. Did find one large horse shoe a couple years ago.
 

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