people questioning finds (north american artifacts)

[captain redbeard]

Well. Recently I've come across finds in a couple areas and because I'm a "newbie" and because of the amount of finds in a short amount of time that I've found on top of the fact that others have been hunting the same areas for years makes people question my finds. I see where they are coming from, but I try explaining that it really only takes a handful of dirt to hide something like an arrowhead/tool/worked object for many, many years. I bust my ass searching for these artifacts and I feel when I find these things they are legit without a doubt, but I also see where they come from. Their opinion (I know they are like *******s, everybody has one) is that who's to stop someone from making their own and just spreading them out in an area known to artifact hunters? I understand sites, ruins, burials and whatnot have been overrun by amateur artifact hunters since wayyyy before my time, it just makes me wonder sometimes with the amount of finds on top of the variety of finds.
perhaps I'm overthinking the subject and there is way more out there to find than has been found, but...

My question is, have you come across people like this? and How do you go about explaining it? ( without being a professional archaeologist ) maybe a lot of people who hunt are more knowledgeable on the subject and maybe no matter what you do haters will be haters, but it still lingers.

 

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[Charl]

When I hunt a specific site, be it a corn field or a shoreline location on one of our bays, I basically have two goals. Short term is to find artifacts surface hunting the site. Long term is to educate myself on the prehistory that I am collecting. I want to know as much about that piece of real estate as possible. The key is eliminating "collector bias" as much as possible. Some folks won't recognize, or if they do, won't collect something as un exciting as raw graphite showing scraping activity from extracting pigment. But that's a paint stone, I won't leave it there. I pick up things that earlier generations might have turned their noses up at, like crude hammerstones or crude notched weights. And eventually I will have an assemblage that will tell me as much about the prehistory of that land as can be had by way of simply surface hunting.

Approaching a field as a mystery, as a blank slate whose history/ prehistory is unknown is an engaging activity. That field, that site, has a history that can be unraveled, and I enjoy putting together the record of that history/prehistory that a good site assemblage represents.

In general, I find most people are in fact quite interested in learning more, rather then conveying the idea that they think "boring" or "crazy". Almost everyone is eager to learn more when they learn what you're doing out there. I stalk artifacts. I stalk the past. I recreate the past. I can point to a specific area in a specific field and tell someone "right there was a soapstone workshop 3500 years ago".

 

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[Charl]

Come to think of it, the only time anyone looked me in the eye and said "you're a dang fool!", it was a farmer who had just given me permission to walk his fields. And he was a Yankee farmer, so I got it. If the job you have in mind does not have a practical purpose, then "you're a dang fool to be pickin up rocks in a field, but go ahead". That's a Swamp Yankee for ya, lol. I just laughed and told him "I've pretty much mastered being a dang fool, thank you very much!"