Fate is the Hunter - Ten Years in the Making	by David L. Greives
Central States Archaeological Societies 2021 October Journal	West Lafayette, Indiana

 

This excerpt from "Fate is the Hunter - Ten Years in the Making" published in the 2021 Central States Archaeological Societies 2021 October Journal Read the complete column in the Central States Archaeological Societies 2021 October Journal which can be purchased on-line after March 2022

Picture of the site, showing nitrogen applicator direction of furrows where exposed cache of bi-point and round base blades were found on November 19, 2020. Immediate surface was raked for additional blades and none were found. Location of the find is marked by the rocks at the center of the photograph.

My interest and passion for surface collecting of Native American artifacts started early in life between six and seven years of age. My father farmed considerable acreage in Benton, Warren, White and Tippecanoe counties in Indiana. He needed someone to warm the seat of a McCormick-Deering International M-tractor, pulling a 10-foot tandem disc. As all of our farm ground was fall plowed, discing for spring planting brought about the opportunity to find quite a few artifacts in one day. For a young man, collecting these artifacts became a great way to connect to the past while looking forward to the future. My artifact collecting days continued for many years following those early experiences on a tractor up to the present.

But enough of the past. From the late 1940s, let us fast forward to the year 2010. During the early spring of that year, a friend told me about a field site that had recently been cleared for farming in 2007. After a personal visit with the landowner, I received verbal permission to surface hunt the site without future contact. The site, which had been a woods/pasture, was bull dozed clear of virgin timber, brush and rocks. Native Americans would sometimes place a large rock over the cache site to mark its location. Once cleared, the site was never plowed and only subjected to minimum-tillage farming. It was located on the immediate edge of what was once a large cranberry marsh and peat bog. After a greater percentage of the peat was removed by the Milburn Peat Company, the depression became a large lake known as Otterbein Lake.

Over the years 1950 to 1960, many Mastodon remains were removed from the bog, then sold and shipped to various museums across the county by railroad flat cars.

My first opportunity to surface hunt the field came on a misty and rainy Saturday afternoon in early April 2010 with my friend Christian Foster. At that time, my first find of a slightly damaged 7” bi-point blade was recorded. No other blades were observed. Between the years of 2010 and 2020, various other broken halves were found, brought up by farm equipment over that 10-year period, but no other complete blades. I had no doubt that there was a cache buried somewhere on that hill, but where? I knew I just had to keep looking. No digging is allowed in Indiana without a permit, so my efforts were limited to only surface hunting. In my opinion, this law is an intrusion of our freedom by the state of Indiana! Very few states have this law.

Several years ago, during my professional pilot career, the opportunity became available to read a book by the author Earnest K. Gann, titled, “Fate is the Hunter.” And fate and the excellent accuracy of a tractor driver applying nitrogen to a recently harvested soybean field prepping for the 2021 corn crop brought to light a surface find of a large group of bi-pointed and round-base cache blades. One of the applicator shanks went right over the top of the cache, exposing...

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Read the complete column in the Central States Archaeological Societies 2021 October Journal which can be purchased on-line after March 2022

Some of the blades in a box after removal from their prehistoric hiding place.