Thank you for all your responses. To answer some of your questions:
We were vacationing in SC, like we do each year and we always stay by this very remote beach on Hilton Head Island. We also found an Indian spearhead or arrowhead on this same beach a year ago which we took to a local historian and he confirmed that it was an Indian spearhead.
We found this new artifact while digging below the high tide mark, in very wet sand.
Were you metal detecting, and this caused your detector to go off? What you have to understand about this beach is that it usually gets completely covered by water right up to our house during high tide and our house is about 100 yards away from the shoreline of this beach.
We appreciate the responses saying that this artifact might be just a lost item, but if you actually hold this piece in your hands and really look at it in the pictures, you can tell that this is from a long, long time ago, so we know that this does not belong to any tourist or is not just some lost item or an import for a tourist.
We can't tell what it is even made out of
Will a magnet stick to it?, we are leaning towards some sort of stone, because it weighs a little too much for it's size.
You could do a few Mohs test to determine hardness, thus eliminating some minerals, but you might not want to do so as not to mar it. And it does have some sort of light reddish, brownish several spots or markings on it, almost petina to it, if you look closely, and we don't know if that's indicative to some sort of stone or clay that has aged over time.
We have emailed already the SC Archaeology Research University, but have yet to hear a response.
Here's a still pic of both the new artifact
Nice point we found and the spearhead we found last year:
Can you post a pic of the back of it using macro settings? Can we get a profile pic to see how far the nose extents from the face. A stone item that has been taken in and out with the tide twice a day will have a smooth exterior, thus the nose would be the first area to be worn down.