Artifacts
Generally,
it takes five hours or hard walking to find one good point to put in my pocket.
Today I was lucky, I found a bone necklace piece, a bird point, and half of a
medicine grind stone.
It has always intrigued me to hold in my hand something made hundreds of years ago by a hunter or even a homemaker. I look up to the hills or at the nearby playa and try to visualize how it was in some time long passed. I have a definite feeling about each piece I find as to the individual and his personality. How the weapon or tool was used and the craftsmanship in making the piece tells a lot about the person that owned each artifact I find.
What is so grand is that there are cultures from thousands of years ago up to the present to study all in the same location. I once thought these people must have had a hard life. But now I think of their isolation, abundance of food, and natural protection, and it gives me the feeling their lives were more serene that ours. Only when invaders like the white man came was there real upheaval.
If you have not slept in a deer hide tent or under a buffalo blanket you have missed knowing how warm and cozy it was without all our modern conveniences. The buffalo left manure chips for fire and the water was pure and clean to drink. Yes, it was cold in the winter and hot in the summer, but there were many valleys with caves, rocks to get under, and some trees for shade. When the flies got bad they just moved their camp to a fresh location.
The necklace piece I found was probably a bone from a first kill of young hunter and worn thereafter for luck. The hole in the necklace was worn oblong and the bone polished a though it had been worn for a long period of time.
The medicine grindstone must have been used for more than a hundred years and passed from generation to generation. It is cupped on each side from grinding and is still stained with the berry juice much like some of the Matas I have that show war paint from centuries ago.
One Mata I found sticking out of the side of a wash still had the grind rock under it. The grinder must have been hidden for the summer just before the camp headed off to follow the buffalo. Some woman probably returned to used the grinder another winter, but something happened and her hidden treasure was never used again.
The bird point I found today is very small and were used to kill buffalo
as well as birds. The small point would penetrate deep into the bison's
hide. This point belonged to someone who
was a perfectionist. The chipping is flawless. Some of the larger points I have
found have rifling, much like the principal modern rifles use to spin the
bullet on a true course. These points
are thick on one side and thin on the other making the arrow spin true. It is
hard to believe they knew how to make the arrow spin and hold a course. Others points I have found in this area tell
of a time before the bow. They are long and convex on the surface and were used
as a spear point.
There are evidences of as many camps on the plains as in the valleys.
Generally on the plains I find clues on the Southwest side of a Playa Lake.
Bloodstones as I call them (or boiling rocks) are prevalent on he Southwest
side of many Playa's in the Texas panhandle. I think the prevailing Southwest
wind led the people to camp so the buffalo gnats and mosquitoes would be blown
away from the camp. May be that the sand-blows have covered the evidence of
camps on the North side of the lakes. The rainwater in the lakes was fine for
bathing or drinking as the grass and reeds purified the water.
These people of the plains must have been a hardy peace loving bunch because
I can feel them around me and they cry out for me to understand that they were
tied to the land and game. They had to fit into the a certain pattern to live
and survive. They are telling me it has not changed for us even with our
concrete buildings and gas heat. By the number of flint chips and fireplaces I
find, there must have been more people in Briscoe County's past than in all
recent history combined. I wonder and listen to the hills for a message from
the past. Sometimes I can feel the people watching me. I can hear the wail of
the women in the heat of battle. Some of the grounds I walk show signs of war
and tribulation, and some of a definite winter peace.
