Why so many?

[rmartin]

orari wrote:

I would also add that many of the pp/ks and tools we find are intentionally thrown away items that had seen the ends of their useful lives.  Think lithic garbage.

  Good observations everyone. Orari. I think his is good one too. Most people do not want to hear that their 2 inch arrowhead is actually a highly used and discarded knife form. In lithic rich areas such as I hunt this was common practice.

[JoshinMO]

12,000 years  :woohoo: Thats a long time!

[clambellies]

I think sometimes the perfect points we find are a result of a bunch of un-hafted points being cached at a camp location while the group moved away seasonally.  They knew they'd be back, so why carry every one of your belongings when on the move?  It's never happened to me but I know of a few guys who found 15 to 30 perfect points of nearly the same material and artistry eroding out of the ground, all within inches of each other.  They were obviously caches, and for some reason the NA's who cached them either died or never came back for some reason.
Following up on the cache idea......What might we have found if we scratched up the ground a bit where a nice point was laying on the surface?

[garscale]

You say you only lost 6 arrows.... now how many bic lighters, pocket knives, forks, spoons, pens, belt buckles, watches, pennies, screwdrivers, pliers, scisors, bullets,etc have you gone through. Everything they used for those functions were typically stone and meke up the artifacts we find in a camp times say 30 people per year, times 13,000 years. It gets into the millions quickly.

[waterglass]

orari makes a really good point, alot of the field grade stuff you find was discarded. You dont find many large stage 1 points because they were never discarded purposefully except maybe during some kind of ritual sacrifice or hidden storage caches. If you find a stage 1 point, look around you might find more close by. I have several times. They had all been broken by cultivation, but they were clearly  cache sites.

[Lithophylic]

I have to agree with sailorjoe, most of it has to do with time.  You lost six, in a year, If there are a thousand of you times 6000 years, add in impact breaks and worked down points and you have a lot of flint in the ground.

[waterglass]

Let us do some simple math. Let us say an arce of ground was pretty much inhabited by a group of 15 people for 10K years. 6 men 4 women five children. Let us say each person discarded 50 used up tools and broken points a year, lost 3 first stage points per years and another 30 or projectile points and lesser knives were lost or cached and forgotten.
You'ed have
45,000 first stage points
7,500,000 tools, brokes and used up field grade points
4,500,000 good points and knives
so over 12 million artifacts Spread over 40,000 square feet area. Sounds like alot, but it aint when you think about soil volume and the size of the area. so you;ed have 300-350 pieces per square foot in two demisions, but they can be spread pretty thin when the points are vertically stratified another 2 or 3 or 15 feet in the dirt. and in my experiance you will find alot of stuff  spread over a small area and nothing 50 feet away. They lost or discarded the most stuff where they worked.
I have no doubt I am over estimating the numbers some for most areas, but you get the point to make a pun.