A Find

I was out walking with the dogs around the south side of the house yesterday afternoon and came across this nice chalcedony interior flake a few yards southeast of the garden. In the five years we've lived here I have found a number of pieces of stone that looked almost like artifacts, but in every case I concluded the breaks were due to being hit by earthmoving equipment during the construction of our house. We often call these "dozer-facts."

This piece has so many systematically placed, well-formed flake scars, I'm convinced it's the real thing. Also, there is a fair amount of chippable tool stone naturally occurring on our property in the form of nodules of petrified wood. The "dozer-facts" I have seen until now were all petrified wood. This chalcedony isn't like anything else I've seen here and was evidently brought in from a distance away. Though it doesn't show well in the pic, it's a translucent yellow-orange material.

I emailed Steve and Chas yesterday telling them how excited I was to find this. Chas replied:

"Long ago, in the Pleistocene, ancient hunters sat where your house is, chipping points and thinking about how to hunt the horses in the meadow below."

I certainly like to think so!