Cedar Key and Gulf Hammock, Fl

[Blue_Runner]

Cool Wilson! Surely you guys found the occasional stone/shell tool. Knives, scrapers, points, etc. Did you?

[Road King Cole]

Thanks,

The story and pictures brought up memories of Egmont Key in Florida off St Pete. In the seventies, I was an ET in the coast guard and every so often we would need to go out to Egmont to do PM on their radio station. Basically I would just ride out with a civilian contractor who did all the work and I would just go out 'xplorin. Whenever that opportunity came up, I was first to volunteer and I would grab my bag and have a nice "vaca" day.

rkc

[RWilson2526]

Originally Posted by Blue_Runner

Cool Wilson! Surely you guys found the occasional stone/shell tool. Knives, scrapers, points, etc. Did you?

Actually never found a stone tool in Florida...FL has no natural deposits of chert or other types of rocks that can be worked into projectiles....there are some stone tools/points found in Fl and when they are it is very significant because it establishes that there was trade with northern peoples where that kind of stone is native. Shell tools were more common , saw some really cool needle like tools for making fish nets out of the center spiral of conch shells, but being that I did mostly shell mound work there was very few...remember it was basically a garbage dump so no native in their right mind would throw away a useful tool.

[Blue_Runner]

That makes sense. I know trade was fairly common due to the fact that non-indigenous stone tools are found in lots of regions.

Actually its quite common to find stone tools around the encampments and even in their garbage. However the ones you find there have almost always reached their end in terms of usefulness i.e. knifes resharpened to to a nub, tools that were repurposed, or in most cases tools that were broken either during use or during production.

I say "almost always" because a decent albeit smaller percentage of the nicer points I have found were found in the encampments. I don't know that they were thrown away - perhaps they were lost for some reason or left behind in haste.