Illustration by Danny Elchert
Twenty steps after I’d been grousing about never having found one, I almost literally stumbled over it.
Bird-watching, hiking, rock climbing, ambling around aimlessly in the woods—I have logged more miles across outdoor Missouri over the years than most. In all that time, I’d never come across a single arrowhead or stone axe or—unless the state’s aboriginal occupants had left behind some polybelt radials or drained beer cans—any other artifact of their existence. Like those benighted souls who can stroll across a meadow and return with enough morels each spring to feed a high school marching band, there are those who will casually reach down in midconversation and pluck up an arrowhead or a hoe blade with the same nonchalance with which you’d pick up a can of soup off the supermarket shelf. I wasn’t one of them. Never had been. It was a long dry spell, but when it broke, it broke with a gully washer. No chipped fragment. No broken barb. On the shoulder of a pebbly stream bank, I came up with a 5-inch blade of milky flint so perfectly carved, it looked as if it had been popped from a museum display and left there just for me to find. Left just to make a liar of me.
All I had to do was stoop over and pick it up.
My find was followed by an introduction to the entire subspecialty of archaeology devoted to unraveling the sorts of knots presented by pre- and proto-historic projectiles. The weaponry of the Folsom and Clovis Periods and all the other civilizations that rose and fell in North America: All have their experts, Ph.D. theses, their minutiae of scholarship. No matter how much I learned later about my find from them, though, it would not mean as much for me as that moment when I picked up that sliver of knapped stone from the edge of the water. I was almost certainly the first of our species to have held it in many—how many?—lifetimes. Who was the last to have rubbed his thumb over the edge, like I did, to test its sharpness? Little doubt he was so unlike me, his world so completely different, that we might as well have come from separate planets. Intellectual curiosity notwithstanding, there is a visceral twitch that comes from happening across a small chunk of our common past, one that’s lain around unnoticed for years. Or centuries. Treasure divers and paleontologists and archaeologists must know that kind of excitement, and so, at the side of the stream, did I.
I found the chert blade alongside a creek that twists through the edge of Rockwoods Reservation, at the far west border of the county, not far upstream from where it empties out into the Meramec River. I’d hiked the stream in every season, shuffled my way over it when it was frozen in winter. In the summer, I’d waded knee-deep, minnows nibbling at my legs. It is what geologists call an entropic stream. It spends a lot of its time snaking back and forth in apparently aimless arcs and bends, the current grinding off a hillside here and dumping its remains there. Spring rains gush and gnaw into the turns in the bank; by late summer the flow is sluggish and contained, almost still in places. Beards of algae drift in it. There are pools that collect in August, deep ones so quiet that golden pollen sprinkles across the surface like dust on a tabletop. It is the sort of stream, so far from any habitation, where you can strip down and slide in, go in so deep the level of the water is just below your nose. Down close, you can breathe in the faint odor of life dying and rotting and coming back again. The August afternoon I found the point was like that. Summer sat full and fat and ripe on the stream and on the land around it.
Was that what it was like, some sultry afternoon a very, very long time gone, when a man had last held the point, worked it back and forth to be sure the lashing was good on the shaft of hickory or ash? Had he been crouching somewhere near here, waiting for the evening, when it would be cool and shadowy enough to draw out a deer from the woods all around, coming down for a drink? I squatted where white basket blossoms of Queen Anne’s lace were nodding, where the rocky side of the stream gave way to weeds, imagining the scenario. My assumption, given the size and heft of my find, was that it was a spear point. For all I knew, though, it could have been some kind of Stone Age Cuisinart accessory.
To find out, I went to an archaeologist friend, who revealed that my guess was a good one. It had been the business end of a spear. She could even pinpoint the place it had come from: a quarry in southern Illinois. I was impressed by her ability to give such detail; even more when she dated it. The spear point hurtled toward its last target—or got dropped and lost—one day between 5000 and 3000 BC, not so very long after the last mastodons were tramping footprints into the soil around here. She tossed it to me; I threw back questions. Had the man with enough technology to have turned a rock into a bladed missile lived in a community? Did he have an aesthetic sense? Did he worship, have etiquette, speculate, cogitate, have some notion of where he’d come from, some expectation of where he was going?
She had some answers. The sculpture in flint—that’s what it is, and how many objets d’art does the collector simply “find”?—was chipped out on the thigh of a man who lived with others in small groups, clans of 20 to 30. Shelters were elemental; he had no food storage aside from fairly rude woven baskets. He did not seem to have decorated any of his belongings or to have paid homage to any deities we know about. Archaeologists deduce some of this, she told me. Anthropology and observation of some tribes not far out of the Stone Age around the world provide comparative insights. Yet for other questions I had about my find and the man who made it, there aren’t any conclusive answers. We can’t look into a man’s mind then or now, or his soul. It is a limitation of sorts, if one chooses to view it that way. If you do not, if you think of the boundaries of science as the beginning of the territories of the imagination, the view becomes much wider. Even if—especially if—you are squatting beside a summer stream and breathing the smells of August and holding in your hand a piece of your past.
