Native Quarrystones

[Mattern]

There is a Native Chert Quarry about 10 miles from my home, that I visit every year. I haven’t found any diagnostic Artifacts and only a few preforms. The waist flakes are more than two feet thick in many places. The Artifacts I find are river hammerstones. The site is about a half mile from the river. These hammerstones, I have studied and compared to cultural site hammers. Most are heavily used many are cracked apart. Some resemble regular hammerstones. None have been pitted. A few are definitely abraders. I have no indication of how long this quarry was used. The Pictures speak for themselves. Note. If you find hammerstones look for the indication of heavy use and cracks, you may have a hammer that was used to reduce material for tool making. Not much to look at but I find them interesting. All found at the Quarry. Kim

[Hal Gorges]

Good info Pennsylvania boy. Way to clean up the environment… Everyone needs a rock garden with some in it..☃️☃️☃️🌴🌴🌴🦩🦩🦩🇺🇸

[Ron Kelley]

Thanks Kim, This is an interesting post. When we hear the word "Hammerstone" we usually think, "A tool for percussion flaking a point." Of course Hammerstones that were used for spalling were bigger. The hammerstones that were used to mine native copper weighed several pounds.

[Mattern]

Thanks Ron, I love to do comparison diagnostics. And this one is most interesting. K

[PointHound]

Thanks for the info. Not many outcrops in this immediate little local area. I think they were mostly getting their material from pickup, and stream beds around here, locally anyway. Kind surprised you aren't finding other stuff around there.

[Mattern]

A large field near there maybe 500 yards or more is full of waist flakes and Artifacts. K

[Mattern]

A large field near there maybe 500 yards or more is full of waist flakes and Artifacts. K

[Cecilia]

You are lucky —- nearest repository to me 80 miles away. (But we got lotsa quartz!)

[JEBMs]

Thank you for the information, that is interesting.
We don’t have quarry sites anywhere close to here as a matter of fact we don’t have much in the way of rocks at all. The Indians here would travel 50 to 60 miles across the Delta (very flat land with old river runs creating swamps) to the hills that border us to the east. The flat land ends and the hills rise almost straight up and there are gravel pits all over once you get up there. We had permission to look in a workshop site at one of these pits. At the time it was all about the points, celts and things like that, hammer stones and such held little interest for me. I hate that I didn’t have more knowledge back then. Any way we found countless preforms that didn’t suit the knapper and they were discarded and very few finished points. Rather than carrying baskets of rocks all the way across country they would camp there and knock out preforms to increase the efficiency of their load. The pictures are of one of the very few whole or almost whole points we found

[Mattern]

Nice JEBMS. This quarry is in a wooded area so it's very tough hunting as everything is covered in moss, weeds and dead leaves. K