~ by Jeff Tryon
While my grandson was fixing the crumbling driveway he came across a couple of Brown County artifacts. One was an arrowhead, reddish and almost perfect, with only a chip where one of the narrow shoulders should have been. The other was a perfect spear point, maybe six inches long— a very nice find.
I always feel a special connection when I hold something in my hand made by other humans thousands of years ago— a visceral connection to another time and place, to another human being more or less like me, who ate and drank, lived and loved, hunted and travelled, around many of the same places I walk every day.
I picture a man sitting by a fire chipping off pieces of chert or flint, carefully working the stone with bone tools, trying to make something useful, important, and necessary to his survival. He must have treasured this nice long spear point to bring home game to feed his family. Maybe he lost it when the deer or boar he stuck ran away.
All my life I have been finding these mementoes of a past civilization. When we were children, we liked to go to farm fields or gardens when the ground had just been turned— especially when it had then rained upon the new-turned earth— often revealing these ancient artifacts. My cousin has a huge collection of arrowheads, axeheads, throw weights, scrapers, and rocks indented from grinding or pounding nuts and hides.
There’ s never been much evidence found of any kind of permanent Native American village or community in Brown County. They were here, but apparently only to hunt for game or gather nuts. The rugged terrain and the distance from large, navigable waters, made Brown County a place they visited but did not settle.
We say they are Native Americans, but, of course, they were immigrants like all the rest of us. Their ancestors came across the land bridge that is now the Bering Sea, following the mammoths or mastodons and other large game.
Evidence suggests that after Native Americans were building mounds and villages elsewhere in Indiana, they used Brown County mainly for hunting and gathering. The abundance of projectile points and scrapers, nutting stones, and grinders indicate that most occupations here were small temporary camps. Large villages were not common here probably due to a lack of large transportation streams. According to the artifacts we’ ve found, the period of most Native American activity in Brown County was around 3,000 B. C., during the Late Archaic period lasting from about 4,000 to 1,000 B. C. Over two dozen sites have been identified from that period— not villages, but“ base camps” of hunters.
Like the early white settlers, they harvested plentiful, seasonal nuts. They used stone tools to process hickory nuts, acorns, and the then-abundant chestnuts. They made breads and soups, but they still had
52 Our Brown County Jan./ Feb. 2017