In June, workers excavated two pits near the spot where David found the first 14 tools.Ī field worker carefully excavates a pit near the spot where an Oregon landowner discovered a cache of 14 obsidian tools.Ī woman fills a dust pan with dirt, and then hands it to a colleague who starts sifting. Biface caches are relatively rare in the Willamette Valley, and he hoped to find more clues. They're making replicas of the bifaces with a 3-D printer.Įarlier this summer, Pouley brought a team to David’s property to do a formal excavation. The tribe thanked David for reporting his discovery. Today, the Kalapuya are part of the Grand Ronde. Pouley’s best guess is that the cache David found is between 1,000 and 4,000 years old, and that it belonged to the Santiam band of the Kalapuya. Now, archeologists are using the special qualities of obsidian to map what trade routes in the Pacific Northwest looked like thousands of years ago.
Tools for making obsidian blades skin#
"Then you could also remove little flakes to have a sharp cutting edge to skin an animal, that you know were going to eat for dinner," Pouley said.įor thousands of years, Native Americans traveled to special quarries in the Cascade Mountains to make obsidian tools. With a little work, a biface could be converted into a scraper, a spearpoint, or an arrowhead. If you’re deliberately searching for artifacts, you need a permit before you dig.ĭavid had stumbled upon something exciting. There are exceptions: human remains and religious objects. What we want to do is help inform the landowners.”īy law, artifacts found on private land belong to the landowner. We don’t tell farmers that they can’t make a living," Pouley said. "There are archaeological sites in plowed fields. Julius Samiee, one of David's students, examines the dirt archeologists are sifting through for clues to the origin of the bifaces. They’re afraid their land will get taken away, a persistent myth in Oregon's rural communities. Most landowners don’t report finding Native American artifacts. "I'm still amazed that he did that," said Pouley. So he took some pictures with his phone, and sent them to John Pouley, a state archeologist. Fourteen stones in all, each shaped like a very rough spear point.ĭavid wasn't sure exactly what he'd discovered.
He found another piece of obsidian, and then another. We're just using David's first name because archaeological sites can attract unwanted visitors. He's young, and like any good science teacher, he's energetic and curious. I kind of tossed it aside, and kept digging,” he said.ĭavid teaches math and science. “The next day I dig and a find this black obsidian stone. He figured he could use it to water his vegetable garden. So he got a shovel, to dig out the spring. “I was like 'Oh, this is actually a spring. It was the heat of summer, but underneath the weeds the ground was wet. Related: Oregon Archaeologists Discover 15,000-Year-Old Knife So he borrowed a neighbor's tractor and got to work. David just knew the yard was a mess, chocked with weeds and blackberry bushes. He didn't know that native Americans had once lingered on that same piece of ground.
A thicket of blackberries 10 feet tall grew over the site.Īnd then, a middle school teacher named David bought the house on the little hill. Someone built a house on the hillside under the oak trees. Layers of dirt and tree roots covered the tools. When he moved on, for reasons that remain mysterious, he left behind a cache of at least 14 stone tools, each one about the size of a person’s palm. He lingered by a spring under the shade of oak trees. Archeologists later found a fifteenth obsidian biface and several other stone tools on the site. The 14 original obsidian bifaces found in the cache.
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