Hunting Arrowheads
© By Abraham Lincoln
http://www.flintridgeohio.org/

When I go hunting for arrowheads I know what I am looking for and I expect to find something. I will stop and examine a piece of flint; a mere chip from an arrowhead that is several thousand years old and has been on the ground on this spot for ages. Finding a chip is the first clue that most beginners miss.

I always look for a unique color when I go onto an old cornfield or a one that was plowed and rained on. The colors on the ground in our part of the country are always in the brownish range — some dark and some light with lots of in-between shades of earth colors. If something black pops out at me it is almost always an arrowhead.

The next thing I want to see are small objects with at least one straight side. A straight line doesn't exist in Nature and if you see one it has been made straight by a human being. So arrowheads have at least two straight lines that are the edges of the blade.

The blades are made of flint, often traded but seldom found locally in the rough. Local Indians traveled great distances to obtain new flint stones they obtained by trading. Or, they might set down along what is now called Flint Ridge in Ohio, (a natural outcropping of flint used by Native Americans for as long as anyone can remember) and strike off some promising flakes that are easier to carry home than a chunk of stone.

If you go to Flint Ridge, be prepared to walk on mountains of flint shards that people flaked-off over the centuries. I was astonished the first time I visited the place — astonished that people often at war, could travel such distances and work side by side in peace, fashioning stone implements of war sharper than a surgeon's scalpel, and leave without harming each other.

But the next day, on the way through the woods, to their homes, they would easily put one of those new flints through your head or rib cage and cut off your scalp to add color and excitement to their adventure told around a campfire back home.

The arrowheads we find and pick up and stick in our mouths to get some of the dirt off, were used and not discarded. We could easily be sticking a flint point that killed a young settler, up from Kentucky, in our mouth and never know if they died instantly or suffered through the night before they died.

I remember, in a cornfield, just northwest of Brookville, finding two, nearly identical arrowheads, where the cornstalks grew up out of the ground. Finding two, like that, tells me that the arrows were shot into a human being or an animal that escaped and died, alone, somewhere in the forest.

Since arrowheads are so valuable they were always retrieved from the prey and identified by the markings on the shafts and returned to their owners. It is possible that both arrows were shot into a human being who ended up hiding in the forest where he died and over the centuries the only thing left was the two stone arrowheads that I found.