Bluemoose, You can live less than two miles from the Shoop Site and you won't find a single Paleo tool. You may accidentally find a fluted point that was lost from hunting, but the Shoop is a habitation site. It's restricted and confined to the area they inhabited. The site has defined borders, and isn't any larger than these, and the surrounding fields adjoining these invisible geographic borders do not produce tools, only an occasional point. A single fluted point was found by accident by a lady fishing the Armstrong Creek less than 500 yards from the Shoop. Your photos show a later eared Brewerton point, rough material, possibly silicified shale. The rocks are geofacts, they are natural, broken from larger rocks and shaped by wind, water, and a variety of erosional forces. There aren't any petroglyphs associated with the Shoop Site. Any cairns your finding are large piles of rocks that the farmers removed from the fields over 100 years ago. Back then when the fields were first plowed, the farmers would drag a wooden, flat sled behind the tractor and they would throw the big rocks on the sled. Then they would take these to the nearby woods and dump them in huge piles. When collectors see these, they are still thought to be Indian burial mounds, but, they are just piles of large rocks that would break the farm machinery if hit. The Shoop Site people were Paleo Indians who migrated into Pa. from the west, probably the Ohio Valley. They first found the Onondaga chert quarries in western NY, and that was thier source of chert. They wandered south, leaving behind several smaller encampments, until they reached the Shoop Site. This was a seasonal site, with three intersecting caribou migration routes. There's only 113 known fluited points for the site, between complete and broken, with most of those divided between the Hbg. Museum and the Smithsonian. Which direction is the two miles that you live from the Shoop Site?
It's fascinating, but while the Shoop Site was occupied, there was another Paleo site of a completely different group of Paleo Indians living less than three miles north of the Shoop, and yet there wasn't any interaction between the two. This site, 36DA5, produced only Pa. jasper tools, and two jasper fluted points. Not a single chip of Onon. chert, and very oddly, on the Shoop., not a single tool of Pa. jasper. The jasper from the Shoop was obtained from the Houserville quarries in Center Co. to the west. As I write my thoughts go back to my research, and I can't seem to stop writing. Don't want to bore you, so I'll sign off now!
It's fascinating, but while the Shoop Site was occupied, there was another Paleo site of a completely different group of Paleo Indians living less than three miles north of the Shoop, and yet there wasn't any interaction between the two. This site, 36DA5, produced only Pa. jasper tools, and two jasper fluted points. Not a single chip of Onon. chert, and very oddly, on the Shoop., not a single tool of Pa. jasper. The jasper from the Shoop was obtained from the Houserville quarries in Center Co. to the west. As I write my thoughts go back to my research, and I can't seem to stop writing. Don't want to bore you, so I'll sign off now!
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