Found these yesterday (5-20-090), also along the Colorado river, tx

[abarnard]

Found some interesting artifacts yesterday afternoon on a small trip in the kayak along the Colorado River. One huge chopper, the largest one I have ever found, along with 2 flaking tools, and a gnarly hand club, or axe; you be my guest to figure that one out, it's one of the two. I have never found one like this that fits in the hand as perfect as this one does.. Really cool. It is even smoothed out on the inside where the fingers have been. I have found lots of chipped flint in the vicinity of these tools, so I am thinking that they are used and then discarded or lost. oh, and another small chopper was found. Wish I could have stayed longer but it was getting dark out...

 

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[Th3rty7]

nice finds man, interesting lithics along the Colorado. Kayaks are perfect for river hunting, you get that nice low vantage point that makes it easy to spot stuff as you cruise along. I'm waiting for the rivers and creeks to come down so I can get mine out.

 

[abarnard]

Thanks man... The kayak sure does help me alot because i can cover alot of area, and like you said keep those eyes scanning as you cruise along. I just got the yak about 3 months ago, and I like to fish when I go on my trips down the river. Good luck when the river gets high at your location.

 

[SoIll]

The Colorado River drainage has some complex geology, and some extremely varied alluvial gravels.

You are recognizing conchoidal fracture, but most of it is not systematic and culturally produced. Most of the examples can be very easily explained by their position in the sediments where you found them. I notice that they are all rounded to some extent, and so we know you obtained them from a context of a secondary deposition at the least.

There are a couple of real ones in there(all posts included).

Western Wyoming College has some kooks that did some work on the geology of Colorado River drainage glacial and alluvial deposits back in the '80s, and much of it will pertain to geoarchaeology specifically, and that is exactly what you need.

I agree with this on #'s 3,4,7,8, and 9. The chopper and the other thing looks good though.

 

[abarnard]

Thanks for your opinions. Here's some other pictures of #9 from a side view angle. I hope the pictures are better, I need to get a better camera so I can get some good up close pics, but The edge was worked on each side so as to make a mini little chopper out of it, maybe to chop bones. So I believe it was a multi purpose tool. Yep, there's a lot of gravel on the Colorado River. Conchoidal fracturing is really common in Colorado River gravels?? I thought that conchoidal fracturing occurs when a material such as chert is broken along random planes and are not broken on planes in one given direction in particular. There are no NATURAL planes of seperation. So are you saying that the tool, #9, has natural conchoidal fracturing? From what? From being in more than one depositional environment? There must be some serious complex gravels on the Colorado. I took some more pics to look at of this tool, #7, 8#, #9.