I was 6, or more likely 7, when my grandfather found a treasure. It was perhaps 100 feet from the house where I was born. Half way from the crumbling verandah to the banks of the creek. He had been digging at something. I don’t remember at what exactly, if I ever knew.
Every once in a while he stopped. He would plant the shovel straight down in the ground, so he could rub his hands and wipe his brow and look all around him without unplanting his feet. Then he would start again. He could work like this, in the hot sun, with murderous humidity, for hours without taking a drink. These days we’d say he wasn’t hydrated enough. I think it was a show of his toughness. He was, in fact, very tough. Not too many years after that, however, the first obvious signs of the black lung he’d contracted in 12 years digging seams of coal would appear, and the toughness went out of him bit by bit from then on. Everybody who knew anything about coal knew he was doomed, and the end would be horrible. And it was.
I was looking away. But I think it was the sound of him sticking that shovel in the ground that caused me to just instinctually look up. He was down on one knee, and had a stone in his hand. I returned to what I had been doing, teasing the cat or something, I suppose, and soon he was standing over me. “Look, Tim Lee.” It was a flat stone, about 4 inches wide and 6 inches long and an inch thick at its thickest. It was unnaturally rounded on both ends. Just that alone would have been interesting for half a minute. But I never lost interest in this piece of rock.
On closer examination, it was amazing. Even my uneducated 7-year-old brain knew this was special. It was an ax head worked by a master craftsman. A flintknapper who had probably made a whole lot of ax heads before this one because it was a beauty. Not one of those rough, asymmetrical stone tools but a genuine work of art, phenomenally symmetrical, equally worked on both faces of the blade. And practically engineered. Down the center of each face of the ax was a shallow groove, a place to attach a handle in a way that would keep it attached. And pristine. It looked as if its maker had put the final touches on it, set it down to go get something to eat, and by the time he returned it had disappeared, buried by nature with not a single nick in its still sharp flint edges. Or maybe it was stolen and buried and the thief never came back for it. Or grave goods, intentionally buried but never used.
I’ve always been partial to blades; maybe that stone ax did it. When I was 14, my grandfather gave it to me. He had kept it in a drawer. I kept it where I could see it every day. I learned over time that it was a common late pre-Columbian shape but rare in that it was so heavily flaked. I wish I could show you a photo of it. Unfortunately, through a complicated set of circumstances accompanied by a series of events that I won’t bore you with, that ax wound up decades ago in the hands of my second cousin, and I could never retrieve it.
I did spend a lot of time looking for other ancient worked stone when I lived Colorado. I found quite a few arrowheads. None was anywhere close to being as spectacular as that ax. Here’s one of my finds, an arrowhead taken out of a stream-bed at about 7,000 feet not far from Rifle, Colo. (Now, as I am sure you know, it’s illegal—since 1979—to remove, possess or sell artifacts taken from federally owned or controlled lands as well as Indian trust land. That includes arrowheads. This one wasn’t found on federal land.)
Unlike with the ax head, I wasn’t on the scene when another indigenous relic was found by someone I knew. This time it was my stepdad. He was stationed with the U.S. Navy in Australia for nearly three years during World War II. As he liked to say, he did his part to defeat the Axis by keeping up the spirit of the Australian women by dating them while the Australian men were in Burma fighting the Japanese. As part of this difficult duty, he did a fair amount of beach-combing. And one day, he found this:
It’s an Aboriginal people’s boomerang. Yes, it works, but it’s become too fragile to prove it anymore. I don’t know if he broke any laws removing it from Australia. It’s been mistreated in the 75 years since it was found. It could have been 50 years old then, or 500, or much more. These are not easy to date, but the only amateur expert who ever looked at it said it has the look of being “really old” and the technique with which it was made also suggests this. Whatever its age, it’s another blade I’ve chosen to keep.
So...how’s about you? Ever find anything old that you still treasure? Did you lose it again?
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