finding history on the property

[Nyboy]

A few miles from my country home, in Hyde Park a home owner was cleaning back yard pond. He uncovered a Mastodon skeleton !!

 

[so lucky]

Wow, that makes me wonder if the pond was there for thousands of years, or the skeleton was just under the bottom soil when the pond was dug.
Near St Louis is Mastedon State Park, where skeletons were found and excavated ...maybe 50 years ago....

 

[frontiergirl53]

That's soso cool @majorcatfish ! Our friends have a ranch in NM and there are bits of pots, arrow heads, and beads around their property. I've always loved history too, especially native American history, so cool!

 

[catjac1975]

A few miles from my country home, in Hyde Park a home owner was cleaning back yard pond. He uncovered a Mastodon skeleton !!

I have a hard time envisioning dinosaurs stomping through my daylily gardens.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Grandpa found an arrowhead in his garden once. At least, he said it was an arrowhead (by the time I saw it in his house, it was so chipped and worn it didn't look all that different from a slightly pointy rock.

I'm pretty good at finding interesting things but most are more geological or paleontological than archeological. Few fossils, couple meteorites, smattering of semiprecious stones. Most "relics" that have showed up are fairly recent; marbles (the modern machine made kind not the really fancy handmade German kind of the 19th century) darts, and so on. Our neighbors dug up an old milk bottle (circa about 1938 or so I think) which I got when they moved, which is probably about the biggest thing found around here.

Theoretically there may be some old items in the woody parts between us and the hospital too. At least when I was a kid (back when the fence had some holes and you could get through it. I remember a trip back there to collect ferns for dad's shade garden and I seem to recall that along one stream back there there were some things that looked like old washtubs (and possibly a laundry mangle) Odd since I don't seem to recall there EVER having been any houses back there (maybe leftovers of some small depression era squatter's shack)

 

[catjac1975]

today was cleaning up the campfire area of leafs and all the nails from burning pallets, while using the bow rake something caught my eye bent over and it was a seashell. let me take you back about 10 years this area of the property.
View attachment 6150
use to grow corn in till the tress got to high, while tilling it found a arrowhead it was not whole but still you could see the makings of it being worked. well today right about where the stick is standing up to the left raked up the shell. picked it up cleaned it off you could see that it's been there for a long time, stopped what
i was doing came inside and start to google shells it's a prickly cockle definitely not a freshwater clam.
View attachment 6153
so did research before an invasive species arrived this area was a melting pot of indian tribes which got along with each other and traded among themselves, there was the roanoke,occaneechi,catawba,saxapahaw,lumbee just to name the ones that were in this general area.

since the property has year round spring water <northern headwaters for the haw river>
View attachment 6155
this would be a ideal location for a camp plenty of water,game,nuts,berries.
so going to do some more research on this might even do some anthropology digging. history has always intrigued me. looks like i have a great wintertime project........

Major-Am I seeing carved images on that shell?

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Might be, but those kind of markings are also very reminiscent of shell damage from marine worms.

 

[digitS']

I'm surprised that this generates so much interest on TEG. However, I've already alluded to me not being a "digger." I once had a directed study in a university museum. I was ssooo bored!

Yes, native American is more interesting to me than paleontological but when I was last looking at this thread, we were talking about pachyderms.

Not far from where I live: THE PALOUSE MAMMOTHS "... more jawbone than you like to take, but existing facts cannot be avoided" as quoted by the author .

Steve
Oh, if you want to see the Palouse mammoths, they are on display at the U of Chicago museum.

 

[bobm]

We bought our 20 acre ranch what was an cattle open range land for over a hundred years.Our next door neighbor in C. Cal. found a mortar and pestal for grinding acorns with the bottom of the bowl worn all the way through under an old Valley Oak tree on a bank of a dry creek bed. Behind our back property line is a original Wells Fargo Stage Coach and Pony express remount station. I found an old rusty hand made horse shoe with square nails still in it where one of their horses had lost that shoe. I never found anything else on our property as we did a lot of land leveling and excavating foundations for house and barns, and dug a 100' x 120' x 5' deep ponding basin for flood control near the house and used the dirt to raise the house site by 3'.

 

[Carol Dee]

The only artifacts found on this city lot where unearthed when we set posts for the deck and dug the original koi pond. Mostly broken pottery, some square nails ands old medicine bottles. DH figures it was stuff they threw in the out house or a dumping site for the non-compostable or non-burnable items.