Several from this weekend

[ALwaterfowler]

Hi everyone,
Turkey season started this past weekend and I was also able to do a little surface hunting as well. These all came from ag fields on the same piece of property. Lots of recent rain and plowed up fields certainly helped. A couple of these look like various scrapers and there are two curved pieces that possibly resemble pottery?
I would love if ya'll could provide ID help! Thanks everyone.

[ALwaterfowler]

[SDhunter]

Most are just flakes,  but the center white one may be an end scraper,  but can't really see the end.  There is no pottery here.  There may be a little
edge work on a couple of them,  so they may have been used.

[sailorjoe]

I agree with SDH. No pottery here. I see no purposefully made tools either. But I do see several of those as pieces of chert that were struck from cores and then utilized as flake knives. This was common during all cultural periods and chert being what it is can kinda be considered the "razor blade" of stone age, prehistoric times.

[ALwaterfowler]

Thanks. Is pottery pretty much always made from clay?

[sailorjoe]

AL: There were pots that were carved from soapstone during the mid to late Archaic period. These pots and broken pieces of them are found in several areas of the eastern, southern and midwestern states. They were used prior to discovering how to make pots from clay.

[OBION]

Id go back and keep looking, I bet there is a point hiding somewhere!

[painshill]

sailorjoe wrote:

AL: There were pots that were carved from soapstone during the mid to late Archaic period. These pots and broken pieces of them are found in several areas of the eastern, southern and midwestern states. They were used prior to discovering how to make pots from clay.

  It’s also worth mentioning that clay almost always needs the addition of a “temper” component – a non-plastic material that helps prevent shrinkage and cracking during drying and firing.
Suitable materials include grit/sand and various crushed stones or minerals (sandstone, limestone, igneous/volcanic rocks, feldspar, mica); crushed shells, including fossilised ones; sponge spicules (primarily freshwater); crushed bone; charcoal or ash (from either bone or wood); straw chaff/plant fibres (including things like Spanish moss); animal dung (from herbivores); and crushed material salvaged from broken pots (known as “grog”).
There are notable exceptions. Some Hopi pottery was made with kaolin clay of such high purity that temper was not necessary and some clay sources (for Hopi, Taos Pueblo and Picuris Pueblo people for example) included moderate levels of naturally-occurring mica or sand. The “chalky ware” of the St.Johns culture in Florida was produced with clay that was naturally rich in accumulations of sponge spicules that served as a tempering agent.
The addition of lithic materials as temper can sometimes make it really difficult to tell whether you have a piece of stone or a piece of pottery… but the type of temper can also be a useful aid to dating or attributing pottery sherds.

[ALwaterfowler]

Thanks ya'll, very informative

[ALwaterfowler]

OBION wrote:

Id go back and keep looking, I bet there is a point hiding somewhere!

  Here is a nice one I found this past fall in the same place:

http://arrowheads.com/index.php/forums/what-did-i-find/84271-stanfield#150180

[Dirt e Deeds]

Your in the right area. Try to find mudflats and bare banks nearby. Rake away leaves etc from the bank. Sometimes debitage doesn't mean points. I've got a place that's knee deep debitage that has rarely been hunted. It was a quarry mainly for chert nodules. You can find tons of debitage performs and crude blades but hardly any points as they hunted elsewhere or traded them off I assume.
Best thing to do is look at the terrain and find game trails. Terrain hasn't changed much in last 11000 years. Game trails near waters edge will hold a lot of points I've found. I got certain spots I go everytime it rains hard and pull something out. Just find a mudflat or bank near there and do a slow walk close to the ground flipping anything that shows work.