Big Eddy

The leftward-pointing base of a St. Johns variety San Patrice point that I excavated at the Big Eddy site in SW Missouri in 2005. This unit proved to be pretty "hot." I'm positive there were gobs of useful artifacts in the meter-plus-thick 2 meter x 2 meter unit that I excavated. I began digging in the early Archaic deposits and finished in PreClovis deposits. I actually found a chert geofact that some Pleistocene mega-mammal had crunched off of a larger rock sometime in probably the past 500,000 or so years, based upon the wear on the piece. Had it been an actual human-produced artifact, it would probably have been the first verifiable artifact in North America. Too bad some hose-nosed grass-eating behemoth just crunched a rock underfoot of while going for a drink at the river sometime long before humans were around in fecund populations in North America.

Image copyright: ackittiwack, hosted on Flickr and displayed under the terms of their API.