The Dawn of an Interest in Local Archeology

Several years ago, the Concord Museum had an exhibit called "From Musketaquid to Concord" that displayed some beautiful stone tools found in Concord and published a small book about Concord pre-history in the last 10 thousand years since the passing of the glacier. I had never realized there was archeology here, and had never stopped to think about the depth of 10 thousand years. I thought there had to be some traces left after all that time, perhaps rocks polished from having been sat upon for generations. Outside the window is where the Indians were living for all that time, and they must have left some traces.

With this thought in mind, I walked out into the garden and the first large rock I looked at had a ground channel at the top. (photo at left) You could sit there comfortably and polish an axe. It didn't take long to find three or four other examples of large rocks with a ground hollow on top, and it turns out that they are common in our woods. After these discoveries, I started keeping my eyes peeled for unusual rocks in the woods and also started reading archeology books from the library.

There are other large stones in Concord which are prehistoric artifacts. Perhaps you have seen them and not known what they were. Here are two pictures (right and below left) of a beautiful corn grinding stone at the doorstep of the yellow farm house on the crest of Virginia Road. The developer "found it nearby in the woods".

Local stones show the hand of man
George Carter's "Earlier Than You Think" has a lengthy discussion of what kinds of forces break rocks, and how you can tell the difference between naturally broken rocks and rocks broken by man. For example when a rock is struck with a "percussive force" a flake is removed, leaving a smooth convex scar; but when frost breaks a rock, it breaks along (usually straight) cleavage lines and leaves a scar with a rough surface. There is no confusing the two.

Reading this I thought: "Wait a second, I have been seeing broken rocks my whole life, those couldn't be man made". But just in case, I thought, why not go out and take a closer look at all those broken rocks. This turns out to be the best strategy for finding stone tools: it is easy to learn to spot convex flake scars, but impossible to recognize the shape of an unfamiliar tool type.

Before leaving the subject of George Carter, it should be admitted that his book is anathema to academic archeologists because it proposes that man was present in the Americas before the glacier. Nonetheless his observations about rock breakage seem to be quite correct. For example rivers do not break rocks, rather they round and smooth rocks. All those cracked rocks along a river actually ARE stone tool making debris, left over a very extended time. Believe it.

Believing that there are stone tools underfoot is an important component of actually finding them. Recognizing percussive flakes is another. So to find an arrowhead you need three things: you need to be looking very carefully, you need to be standing on top of it, and you need to believe it is there. You may see a fraction of an inch of an edge visible above the surface of the soil, so don't look for arrowhead shapes, look for convex flaking. Your eye becomes sensitive to the pattern and you start seeing stone tools where you wouldn't expect to find them. (I once came across several large two handed choppers on a rocky beach, easy to recognize because of the convex flakes but the wrong size and shape to be arrowheads; they could have been used for butchering whales - you would never start out looking for that kind of artifact but, in retrospect, whales do get beached and do get eaten.)

I have come to understand that we live with prehistory all around us. Driving home from work, as I come back into the Hanscom basin and the Elm brook watershed, these brooks lead past ancient corn plantings. The fields mean prairies where large game was hunted, that swamp means a lake where early lakeshore cultures fished, cut reeds for baskets, hollowed out logs for boats.

The scenes and the imagined activities are still visible in the rocks. If you look, you, too, could begin to see the possibilities right in your own back yard.

Text and photos ©1998 Peter Waksman