Holy chert

[Kaleb]

We just had our first good snow storm of the year so I had to find somewhere without snow to hike today. I thought it was going to be a not so productive hike since I was in unfamiliar territory. Instead it turned out pretty good I found a huge outcroping of chert that I'm pretty sure most of the materials i find sounds my area come from. I also found a really cool cave nearby with some pictographs in it. So all in all not a bad day for a new area.

[Lindenmeier-Man]

Beautiful materials, the cave sounds VERY interesting !

[Kaleb]

Just posted some pics of it. It was an unexpected find I saw it and thought I saw red on the wall from a distance. So i pulled out my binoculars and had one of those "no way" moments. It was pretty exciting.

[Kaleb]

Here's the cave. Looks like it's been vandalized it's too bad but there's no changing it now

[Lindenmeier-Man]

Do you think the bottom of the cave has been dug and sifted ?

[Kaleb]

It doesn't seem like it but a lot of kids seem to have had fires there. Found this one little scraper showing and some large nodules tucked away in a little compartment type area

[Kentucky point]

1. Flintknappers dream! Man, I'll bet that area is loaded with bifaces...

2. Dig and sift that cave! There could be a ton of great stuff in there. With permission of course.

[Kaleb]

if I can get permission I will be digging it up.

[clovisoid]

Awesome looking material & scenery!

[redrocks]

Hey man. That's awesome ...what a find

[Kaleb]

Here is some pictures of the little shelf with the nodules on it and the scraper, it's really more of a utilized flake. The last picture is pretty weird not sure if it's recent or not but there is a hole carved/drilled in the cave someone stuffed something in it i couldn't get out but you can still tell what it is.

[SurfaceHunter]

So what do you think is stuffed in the hole

[Kaleb]

It was a bone but it was hammered in there I couldn't pull it out with my fingers.

[Kaleb]

At least I'm pretty sure it as a bone...

[Lindenmeier-Man]

Keep us up , so interesting !

[Tam]

Is this cave / site registered at all with any archeologist digs ?
you may have stumbled on the lotto .
who know it’s interesting . Dig around first and get some artifacts .
if the Petros are really it should be registered or something .
This is the kind of stuff that keeps me coming back .

[Kaleb]

It's not registered there is quite a few rock art sites I've stumbled across here that no one seems to know about.

[Kaleb]

I think the reason these sites go unnoticed is because Fremont Indian state park is only about 30 miles from where I live.

[tomf]

Really interesting discovery.

Brilliant to find source of local lithic.

What do you know of the culture in that area ? Can you tell us anything about cave inhabitants?

[smbore]

Looks to me possibly Fremont they used alot of triangle bodys in their paintings.

[Kaleb]

The paintings are defiantly the Fremont. They lived on low lying benches above rivers and creeks and they used stone and mortar for pit houses and graineries. The graineries are my favorite to look for and find, they would put them in difficult to reach places. They were usually placed high on a cliff face or deep in canyons under overhangs well camouflaged with their surroundings.

Most of the cave/overhang shelters i find seem to be paleo thru archaic. With the exception of conveniently located shelters along the main canyon passageways just above creeks or rivers or near a quarry in this case.

The Archaic people in my area seemed to prefer higher areas away from the valley floor or it's just burried extremely deep. This area was plagued with floods when the pioneers settled here. 3 major floods happened in 4 years each depositing 8-14 inches of mud through the whole valley each time. One Fremont site excavated dated to 850-1000 bce. Named backhoe village was 8 feet below the surface. So I could only imagine how deep the archaic layer might be in the valley. The flooding was pretty consistent and the settlement was almost abandoned at one time but a few stubborn residents developed a flood control plan and saved the settling. Sorry I got a little off topic there.

Anyways back to it. The archaic people at least of the higher areas seemed to prefer a nice spring or between a small creek and it's tributary on higher safe ground. They left petroglyphs and pictographs in what is know as barrier canyon style (Large limbless triangle shaped anthropomorphs). In most instances there is more recent pictographs present as well.

There was one major paleo discovery here. Fun fact, it's located above the coal mine I work at and just for safety the area underground was cribbed with large oak blocks from floor to ceiling. That ensured if there was a collapse the site would remain unharmed.

In the cave they found several Clovis and Folsom points and even mammoth bones on the surface ire within a few inches of it. They also found artifacts from every time period up to historic. They found pictographs that archeologist theorized might be from late to transitional paleo but no efforts were made to prove the theory.

Well I'm going to call that a little over explanatory. Sorry if it seems like I was rambling cause I kind of was. Hopefully you enjoy a little bit of Sevier County Utah history.

[Kaleb]

Just to be clear some of that is my own opinion and not archeological fact. I hope is pretty obvious what's opinion and what's not.