Decided a small flint scraper from a local dig site was a nothing-burger, turns out it was a 6,000 year old tool

I was helping out at the Smith Creek dig outside Austin last fall and found this tiny scrap of flint that looked like a broken rock to me. The site director, Dr. Hayes, kept saying it was a hide scraper from the archaic period, and I honestly thought she was stretching it. Then she showed me the microscopic wear patterns under a 30x loupe, and you could see the polished edge from scraping animal hides. Has anyone else had a field find that you dismissed at first but later turned out to be something real?

3 comments

3 Comments

cole_murphy10d ago

miasanchez brings up a good point about the dating. But what nobody's talking about is how many of these "nothing-burger" finds end up in private collections instead of getting proper documentation. I've seen three different guys in this area alone who pulled scrapers out of creek banks, thought they were junk, then sold them on Facebook Marketplace for beer money. That scraper from Smith Creek probably has a specific soil layer tied to a carbon date, and if it got tossed in a shoebox with random arrowheads, that context is gone forever. The real loss isn't the rock itself, it's the spot it came from.

miasanchez10d ago

Wait, was Dr. Hayes definitely talking about the archaic period? Here in central Texas, the archaic period runs from like 8000BC to maybe 1000BC, but a lot of early hide scrapers from that area actually pop up in the late paleoindian transition. I pulled a similar scraper from a creek bank near Wimberley a couple years back and thought it was just a flake from a broken core, maybe a cobble that got knocked around in the flood. But after getting it checked by a friend at the Texas Archeological Society lab, the edge polish was super clear under a basic jeweler's loupe. It ended up being from a late paleo camp, not the archaic proper. Might be worth double checking the context at Smith Creek if Hayes was calling everything archaic.

smith.elliot10d ago

My buddy Dave found what he thought was a broken bottle bottom near Denton, but UT Dallas dated it to 1200 AD.