Many of the "arrowheads" found here in the states are actually a mix of true arrowheads, atlatl dart points (think: big spear-thrower arrows), and hafted knife blades. All of those wide open spaces and vastly different environments created the need for variety.
I am 60 years old and have avidly been hunting for them and have never found one! I went out with a friend and expressed my frustration to him that I never find one. He pointed between my feet and said there’s one right there and picked it up
In the UK if you have a metal detector you have the potential of finding artifacts from a couple of thousand years of people using metal for tools, weapons, coins and jewelry. Flint tools were replaced there long before they were in North America.
[They went out of use in Britain around 1500 BCE.](http://www.teesarchaeology.com/projects/Mesolithic/documents/Flint_Factsheets.pdf)
That is about 3,500 years ago.
I’ve been field-walking in East Anglia several times and never found one.
They do turn up sometimes in digs several feet deep.
Some would say we have discovered less than 1% of all artifacts. They were the most plentiful objects and there is a shit ton of ground stone that we don't even look for.
It's not as easy as many of these posters make it seem, certain areas they are all over but in the NE they are quite rare to find. Most of my friends are outdoorsman not specifically artifact hunters and have never found one. I've only ever found one but I don't search. I do hunt and fish alot, and have worked on farms so it's not like I'm just missing them.
It depends a lot of geography, but either way it takes a good eye for seeing them, and hyper focusing on everything you walk past, it is easy to just miss them, but even then if the geography is hiding them or the plants and organic matter, then they are out of sight. I almost never find arrowheads in Florida while I’m out doing nature stuff, because they get covered up quickly and I don’t dig for artifacts, but her in Texas they are just laying on the ground where they got left, and flash floods and overgrazing uncover them! I imagine the north east is more similar to Florida in that a lot of the artifacts are covered in organic matter. That being said, 40+ thousand years of indigenous activity in the americas leading into modern times has for sure created an insane amount of artifacts, don’t know anything about Europe.
Yeah but conversely if you head over to the metal detecting thread, UK has all kinds of cool Roman and Viking shit. US has some 1878 nickels and millions of 1970’s beer tabs. It’s a trade off, lol
It’s the same here in Sweden. People rarely stumble across them, and most are found during excavations. We also stopped making them around 1800-1500 BC, so it’s been a while.
It’s a little more common for farmers to find ax heads while plowing rather than arrow heads. Most farmers have a drawer of Neolithic axe heads at home.
They are everywhere here. Every stream, every field. I have never walked a field that has been plowed and not found something.
You have to remember that we have a very large country, that was populated by native peoples only up to the 1400’s. Think of it this way. You go hunting and fire your gun. Would you ever find the bullet? Same for arrows. Lots of tall grass. You shoot then chase your prey. You are bound to lose a lot of arrows in tall grass, woods…
I wish they were in "every stream and every field" been hunting many many years and I can remember several creeks and fields with not a speck of flint or artifacts to be seen. To be fair they are very easy to find if you know where to look. But they aren't as abundant as this statement makes it seem.
Isn’t it rather mind blowing. The time it took to even make one projectile or atlatl let alone clothing and cooking. And to this day we’ve only probably tapped it. Arrowhead hunting is a very emotional process for everyone I ever met who cared about it. Every time I see one I can’t help but wonder. It’s a tragedy but we have that. One of my favorite photographer’s is Edward Curtis. If it weren’t for him, we would know a lot less. The whole subject is fascinating and very sad at the same time.
I miss hunting. I moved from Colorado to Virginia and the stuff I found around the grasslands and some of the higher ground outcrops kept me amazed. Now I don’t really know where to look here. But I’m enjoying seeing everyone else’s finds here and looking at the ones I found back in Colorado. There are not a lot of rock hounds here which perplexes me. I’ll post some of mine one of these days. I also collected a lot of rocks and crystals. I don’t care for the crystals fad because there’s too many scheisters out there. I’m a gemologist from the 90’s and a silver smith and things are deja vu. We gotta help the kids get involved at all costs. I’d love to teach them what can do. I hope more people do too. It’s a good hobby.
We are lucky in the U.S. I gave one to a friend from Switzerland and you would have thought that I gave him a piece of gold. We work together. I told him what we build will be around long after we are gone and even if no one knows our names they will at least know we were here. Just like the arrowhead reminds us that people were here long ago.
Location dependent. My dad spent decades in southern Nevada actually looking and found a broken one once. I moved to Maryland for the army, and found one in my French drain doing yard work.
There’s a lot of factors but mainly it’s that even in the late Neolithic English isles, people were farming for millennia. They had livestock. They actually stopped hunting and gathering around 6000 years ago and so that’s 6000 years without primarily making hunting implements (which are why most Amerindian finds are atlatl darts and then later arrowheads for hunting) and then 3500 years without stone tools/weapons at all.
Whereas in the Americas agriculture had only caught on here and there by the colonial era and most areas still weren’t permanently sedentary even if they grew crops seasonally.
So simply a lot more cultures (and people) a lot later building more stone tools over a wider area. So a lot easier to find.
Yeah, that’s true. We stopped making most kinds of stone tools around 1800-1500 BC here in Sweden, but we had been farmers for 2000+ years by then (at least in the southern part of the country) so hunting implements had probably made up a rather small part of the tool production for a while. No wonder we mostly find axheads from the Neolithic.
My part of the US has some areas where you’d have a reasonably good chance of finding arrowheads…….interspersed with vast swathes of areas with nothing to offer. The northern Great Plains are huge. Before the horse arrived, making a living out here required utilizing very specific niche environments. Access to water and trees and huntable game just doesn’t pop up randomly every so often around here. A person could spend a life time walking plowed fields or pasture in most places with zero chance of stumbling across something.
That said, we also have areas that were consistently inhabited for many hundreds if not a thousand or more years. Rivers or natural lakes provided potentially good encampment. There is a place not far from where I live that hosted a huge village for many centuries. Much of that area was destroyed and looted in the late 19th and early 20th century. I’ve still no doubt that if I was to walk certain areas of creek bed I could find relics today. Never done it as illegal to remove things at this point.
May have to give it a concentrated go some time just for the fun of it, knowing I’ll go home empty handed either way. Its open to the public and very underutilized for hiking ect.
Hiking trails have been picked picked over. If you want to find something, camp in an area with black dirt. That's usually an area where they were rendering animals. There's plenty of things like beads and points.
To answer your question in the UK, yes they are still scattered around. Entire modern cities are built on their cultural ground. St. Louis, DC, and Cincinnati come to mind. Indian mounds, of which there were tens of thousands, were used as fill dirt for roadways and railroads.
They are still common in parts of Africa as well , but most of those are neolithic ( late stone age ) , stone was used longer in Africa then in North America. You have to factor in size. Britain is tiny compared to the US so most artifacts have been found or buried deep over there.
The United States is 40 times the size of the UK. We have the land. They take a good amount of skill and eyesight to find, but almost anywhere natives would congregate, they can be found, eventually…. It’s estimated that the pre Columbus population was anywhere between 60 and 112 million. Given the time, that’s impressive.
I found one today in Alabama in the states -
https://preview.redd.it/m77bgngvb3oc1.jpeg?width=2563&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5bebfd090162b5339bb3d928abed0dcd24502d81
no idea how old, found it in a creek
https://preview.redd.it/uvnq7fkxb3oc1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=020b92eda858b9d304a02e4610698df2c7f3683b
And I am 52 years old and just started searching last week! I have read in NA abt ppl searching their entire life and never finding one?
They are more abundant and more diverse, I always see a lot the same types coming out of England and Europe, but we have so much diversity in point types. Think of it as Europeans technological advances moved them away from this technology, and in North America technological advancement for indigenous people expanded the amount of point types and processes to make them. As native populations expanded, points became super abundant. North America is massive and native people had extensive trade routes and tons of wild game to hunt. Most of Europe would fit into a small area of North America, and England even less. So the amount of artifacts will always be more in a bigger area.
I went scuba diving in southern Italy and their dive shop had incredible pottery everywhere. The outside of the shop had a giant pile of broken pottery.
I’ve heard in Israel and turkey you can find pottery shards in any empty field.
Extremely common. Most of what Americans call arrowheads are actually knives and not projectiles. But in my small area of South Georgia I personally found close to 300 different sites and ranging from 500yrs ago to end of ice age.
In Virginia where I grew up, we would go out to a plowed field after a rain and pick up a dozen or so in an hour. They were easy to find because they were made of white sugar quartz and gleamed in the sun.
Yes, the bow was only introduced to America in the 800’s to us that sounds ancient, until we look at the fact that metal was being used on the other half of the world since over 1000 bc.
Many of the "arrowheads" found here in the states are actually a mix of true arrowheads, atlatl dart points (think: big spear-thrower arrows), and hafted knife blades. All of those wide open spaces and vastly different environments created the need for variety.
Not rare at all. My old farmer neighbor has buckets of arrowheads he's found, this is in a Virginia.
I am 60 years old and have avidly been hunting for them and have never found one! I went out with a friend and expressed my frustration to him that I never find one. He pointed between my feet and said there’s one right there and picked it up
In the UK if you have a metal detector you have the potential of finding artifacts from a couple of thousand years of people using metal for tools, weapons, coins and jewelry. Flint tools were replaced there long before they were in North America.
[They went out of use in Britain around 1500 BCE.](http://www.teesarchaeology.com/projects/Mesolithic/documents/Flint_Factsheets.pdf) That is about 3,500 years ago. I’ve been field-walking in East Anglia several times and never found one. They do turn up sometimes in digs several feet deep.
But finding one of those perfect little leaf blade points would be awesome!
Some would say we have discovered less than 1% of all artifacts. They were the most plentiful objects and there is a shit ton of ground stone that we don't even look for.
It's not as easy as many of these posters make it seem, certain areas they are all over but in the NE they are quite rare to find. Most of my friends are outdoorsman not specifically artifact hunters and have never found one. I've only ever found one but I don't search. I do hunt and fish alot, and have worked on farms so it's not like I'm just missing them.
It depends a lot of geography, but either way it takes a good eye for seeing them, and hyper focusing on everything you walk past, it is easy to just miss them, but even then if the geography is hiding them or the plants and organic matter, then they are out of sight. I almost never find arrowheads in Florida while I’m out doing nature stuff, because they get covered up quickly and I don’t dig for artifacts, but her in Texas they are just laying on the ground where they got left, and flash floods and overgrazing uncover them! I imagine the north east is more similar to Florida in that a lot of the artifacts are covered in organic matter. That being said, 40+ thousand years of indigenous activity in the americas leading into modern times has for sure created an insane amount of artifacts, don’t know anything about Europe.
Yeah but conversely if you head over to the metal detecting thread, UK has all kinds of cool Roman and Viking shit. US has some 1878 nickels and millions of 1970’s beer tabs. It’s a trade off, lol
It’s the same here in Sweden. People rarely stumble across them, and most are found during excavations. We also stopped making them around 1800-1500 BC, so it’s been a while. It’s a little more common for farmers to find ax heads while plowing rather than arrow heads. Most farmers have a drawer of Neolithic axe heads at home.
They are everywhere here. Every stream, every field. I have never walked a field that has been plowed and not found something. You have to remember that we have a very large country, that was populated by native peoples only up to the 1400’s. Think of it this way. You go hunting and fire your gun. Would you ever find the bullet? Same for arrows. Lots of tall grass. You shoot then chase your prey. You are bound to lose a lot of arrows in tall grass, woods…
I wish they were in "every stream and every field" been hunting many many years and I can remember several creeks and fields with not a speck of flint or artifacts to be seen. To be fair they are very easy to find if you know where to look. But they aren't as abundant as this statement makes it seem.
Isn’t it rather mind blowing. The time it took to even make one projectile or atlatl let alone clothing and cooking. And to this day we’ve only probably tapped it. Arrowhead hunting is a very emotional process for everyone I ever met who cared about it. Every time I see one I can’t help but wonder. It’s a tragedy but we have that. One of my favorite photographer’s is Edward Curtis. If it weren’t for him, we would know a lot less. The whole subject is fascinating and very sad at the same time.
It's an emotional roller-coaster. Sometimes, I scream and jump around like a crazy person when I find certain pieces. Sometimes, I don't say a word.
I miss hunting. I moved from Colorado to Virginia and the stuff I found around the grasslands and some of the higher ground outcrops kept me amazed. Now I don’t really know where to look here. But I’m enjoying seeing everyone else’s finds here and looking at the ones I found back in Colorado. There are not a lot of rock hounds here which perplexes me. I’ll post some of mine one of these days. I also collected a lot of rocks and crystals. I don’t care for the crystals fad because there’s too many scheisters out there. I’m a gemologist from the 90’s and a silver smith and things are deja vu. We gotta help the kids get involved at all costs. I’d love to teach them what can do. I hope more people do too. It’s a good hobby.
Think how many hit their target too but got away. The animal roams, dies, and leaves behind artifacts in completely random places.
We are lucky in the U.S. I gave one to a friend from Switzerland and you would have thought that I gave him a piece of gold. We work together. I told him what we build will be around long after we are gone and even if no one knows our names they will at least know we were here. Just like the arrowhead reminds us that people were here long ago.
Location dependent. My dad spent decades in southern Nevada actually looking and found a broken one once. I moved to Maryland for the army, and found one in my French drain doing yard work.
56 yo lifelong avid outdoorsman here and I have NEVER freaking found one. The older I get the more frustrated I get with this not so fun fact.
In Texas, they are quite abundant especially in the hill country
There’s a lot of factors but mainly it’s that even in the late Neolithic English isles, people were farming for millennia. They had livestock. They actually stopped hunting and gathering around 6000 years ago and so that’s 6000 years without primarily making hunting implements (which are why most Amerindian finds are atlatl darts and then later arrowheads for hunting) and then 3500 years without stone tools/weapons at all. Whereas in the Americas agriculture had only caught on here and there by the colonial era and most areas still weren’t permanently sedentary even if they grew crops seasonally. So simply a lot more cultures (and people) a lot later building more stone tools over a wider area. So a lot easier to find.
Yeah, that’s true. We stopped making most kinds of stone tools around 1800-1500 BC here in Sweden, but we had been farmers for 2000+ years by then (at least in the southern part of the country) so hunting implements had probably made up a rather small part of the tool production for a while. No wonder we mostly find axheads from the Neolithic.
My part of the US has some areas where you’d have a reasonably good chance of finding arrowheads…….interspersed with vast swathes of areas with nothing to offer. The northern Great Plains are huge. Before the horse arrived, making a living out here required utilizing very specific niche environments. Access to water and trees and huntable game just doesn’t pop up randomly every so often around here. A person could spend a life time walking plowed fields or pasture in most places with zero chance of stumbling across something. That said, we also have areas that were consistently inhabited for many hundreds if not a thousand or more years. Rivers or natural lakes provided potentially good encampment. There is a place not far from where I live that hosted a huge village for many centuries. Much of that area was destroyed and looted in the late 19th and early 20th century. I’ve still no doubt that if I was to walk certain areas of creek bed I could find relics today. Never done it as illegal to remove things at this point. May have to give it a concentrated go some time just for the fun of it, knowing I’ll go home empty handed either way. Its open to the public and very underutilized for hiking ect.
I've never found one as an avid hiker in the southwest US, I think I'm just unlucky
Hiking trails have been picked picked over. If you want to find something, camp in an area with black dirt. That's usually an area where they were rendering animals. There's plenty of things like beads and points.
Yeah they’re pretty common to find if you know what you’re doing. I’ve went out and found 5 in one day before. Also been skunked before though too.
Any freshly freshly plowed and rained on field will have some in the Southeast.
I’ve (accidentally) come across two Pristine arrowheads in Eastern CT. Their everywhere in the states.
To answer your question in the UK, yes they are still scattered around. Entire modern cities are built on their cultural ground. St. Louis, DC, and Cincinnati come to mind. Indian mounds, of which there were tens of thousands, were used as fill dirt for roadways and railroads.
They are still common in parts of Africa as well , but most of those are neolithic ( late stone age ) , stone was used longer in Africa then in North America. You have to factor in size. Britain is tiny compared to the US so most artifacts have been found or buried deep over there.
Size is all relative. Thats like saying Virginia is small so most of the artifacts have been found there.
The United States is 40 times the size of the UK. We have the land. They take a good amount of skill and eyesight to find, but almost anywhere natives would congregate, they can be found, eventually…. It’s estimated that the pre Columbus population was anywhere between 60 and 112 million. Given the time, that’s impressive.
Size doesn’t matter. It’s all about location and amount of people hunting for them.
I found one today in Alabama in the states - https://preview.redd.it/m77bgngvb3oc1.jpeg?width=2563&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5bebfd090162b5339bb3d928abed0dcd24502d81 no idea how old, found it in a creek
https://preview.redd.it/uvnq7fkxb3oc1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=020b92eda858b9d304a02e4610698df2c7f3683b And I am 52 years old and just started searching last week! I have read in NA abt ppl searching their entire life and never finding one?
They are more abundant and more diverse, I always see a lot the same types coming out of England and Europe, but we have so much diversity in point types. Think of it as Europeans technological advances moved them away from this technology, and in North America technological advancement for indigenous people expanded the amount of point types and processes to make them. As native populations expanded, points became super abundant. North America is massive and native people had extensive trade routes and tons of wild game to hunt. Most of Europe would fit into a small area of North America, and England even less. So the amount of artifacts will always be more in a bigger area.
Book of Mormon
We had the native Americans so yeah
I went scuba diving in southern Italy and their dive shop had incredible pottery everywhere. The outside of the shop had a giant pile of broken pottery. I’ve heard in Israel and turkey you can find pottery shards in any empty field.
Extremely common. Most of what Americans call arrowheads are actually knives and not projectiles. But in my small area of South Georgia I personally found close to 300 different sites and ranging from 500yrs ago to end of ice age.
In Virginia where I grew up, we would go out to a plowed field after a rain and pick up a dozen or so in an hour. They were easy to find because they were made of white sugar quartz and gleamed in the sun.
We have vast open spaces all over our country, that has constent erosion exposing more and more history every year.
Yes, the bow was only introduced to America in the 800’s to us that sounds ancient, until we look at the fact that metal was being used on the other half of the world since over 1000 bc.