# why?



## Dbender (Feb 1, 2017)

How come when I find an artifact I usually find several in the same general area?   Are these spots old battle spots, camps, or what?    I can't see an indian losing several points in the same spot, or storing them somewhere and I come along and find them thousands of years later.  Any ideas?  I recently found a small pile of artifacts(together) that consists of several points, a flat rock with another for grinding, couple big pieces of pottery, two leg bones and some type of skull bones, along with some mica that isn't found anywhere close to where I found this pile.  Not sure might have been some kind of burial site but extremely shallow.


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## NCHillbilly (Feb 1, 2017)

Probably a cache of stuff at an old village or camp site. There have been many caches of large numbers of points, preforms, and such found over the years.


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## Dbender (Feb 1, 2017)

I can see the cache theory but, how come i usually find several points within the same general area 30 yd radius?


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## NCHillbilly (Feb 1, 2017)

Dbender said:


> I can see the cache theory but, how come i usually find several points within the same general area 30 yd radius?



It's been my same experience through the years, too. A good place to live or camp is a good place to live or camp, and tended to get re-used repeatedly over the millennia.

One mistake some folks make is to think that all the points they find came from the same people, or the same "tribe," or same time period. People have been living here for at least 15,000 years, often with one bunch living or camping in the same places the previous bunches did. Some of my spots, I have found points ranging from 10,000 years ago or older to a couple hundred years old in the same spot. They didn't all get there at once.


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## Dbender (Feb 1, 2017)

I think the same thing about prime locations don't change much from year to year.  How many were used in some type of battle?  Hard to imagine how many indians roamed around in the past.  They must have carried a pile of points everywhere they went.  Apparently they didn't have very good pockets on their buckskins or points weren't a very valuable commodity.


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## doublebarrel (Feb 3, 2017)

I think maybe they had a dove shoot and lost a lot of points,ha,ha. BB


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## NCHillbilly (Feb 3, 2017)

Two more things to consider: 

I am a flintknapper myself. I make stone points. At any given time, there are probably a hundred or more half-finished, broken, or crappy discarded points laying around the part of my yard that I use as a knapping pit. And that's from one person. I'm sure the old-timers were no different, and they lived and knapped in groups. A lot of the points I find in some places are broken during manufacture, unfinished, or have some flaw in them like a big step-fracture that would cause them to be unfit for use. 


I also hunt with stone points. From doing that, I know that you break a lot of them when they hit a rock, a tree, or a bone. What happens to the broken point on your arrow or atlatl dart? You usually bring it home, take it off and discard it, and tie a new one on. Think of how many points you find look to be broken during use. And the same thing with a stone knife-when it gets past the point of further resharpening, you chuck it down and make another one.


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