A Little Known Artifact

We kids used to spend a lot of time around Lk. Washington near Barbee Mill and just upstream from May Creek's mouth. What you see there now is mature alders near the end of their 60 or so year lifespans. Back in the day, however, the creek meandered across a wide cobble field that extended from Lk. Washington Blvd upstream to where I-405 crosses the valley. In those times I had an intense interest in "perty rocks" (for the record, I really dug astronomy, too, during the much simpler 9 planet paradigm where the only moons besides our own I had to know were Mars' Phobos & Deimos) and spent hours poking through this area looking for agates and other "good ones".

It was a pretty easy search and the bar for acceptance was low so I collected a lot of stuff. Some of it is still in a milk crate in the garage, very unscientifically uncatalogued and mixed in with "other people's" rocks from different times and places. But they're all "perty". One discovery, though, was special. I couldn't believe it when I found an actual ARROWHEAD!

Some of the grownups I showed it to couldn't believe it either and were a bit discouraging, saying "it isn't a REAL one, it; it just looks like it." But I knew. Santa wasn't real, but this was! For awhile after that our searches of the gravel bar intensified and an old shotgun shell was found. From their juxtaposition we imagined scenarios wherein these two artifacts were remants of an ancient cowboys and Indians "set-to along the banks of the muddy May" - or something like that.

No milk crate storage for my arrowhead! It's been in a jewelry box in the top drawer ever since and over the years we've learned a little more about it (and that it isn't cool anymore to "collect arrowheads", a science defeating and culturally insulting activity these days right up there with the grave desecrating "pot hunting").

According to an archeologist and paleontologist, my artifact probably isn't an arrowhead, but either a spear or scraper. Possibly it is a discarded unfinished implement that didn't turn out right in the making. Who can't relate to that? The experts also advised that the stone it is crafted from doesn't occur naturally in our area so it came from east of the Cascades via either a trader or ...dum da dum dum...an invader. Whatever the complete facts, it is certainly a Native American tool. And I found it! And it lives on in my jewelry box! Cool.