Native American Artifacts at the Indiana State Museum

I'm here with the state museums archaeologist Michelle green and hi Michelle hi what do you think about this collection yeah this is really impressive this is one of the funnest parts of my job is to be able to look at collections like this for folks that have been walking in their fields their whole lives and have amassed these really cool collections so this is an exciting bit for me well this came from a fuel fountain Avon Indiana and a family has farmed that field for generations and generations but the grandfather and the great-uncle had an affinity for walking the field looking for these and so quite a collection and all from one spot their farmers are there things here that have to do with farming or food gathering or not so much you've got one really good piece that's that's really hinting towards towards food food production food gathering and that kind of thing and that's actually your ceramic piece over here okay so I understand that artifact is something that someone is manufactured are made or changed yes it is modified by humans and so this was clay at one time and it's got some decorations on it and and so this could have held what food that could have been done for cooking it could have been done for storage all the above unfortunately it's too small to get a true idea of its function you typically need the top or the bottom or a bigger part of the vessel to figure that out but one of those two things was going on we do know that so that definitely has to do with food production and so most of these stone artifacts are made from different types of materials we're for food production but more of a hunting and gathering you'd say yeah absolutely there's a huge variety of tools that we have here I think that we could really focus on a lot of times people bring in arrowheads and they say I have a whole box of arrowheads the bow and arrow comes into the Midwest not until about 700 AD or so give or take Wow and Native Americans have been in Indiana in the Midwest since at least 10,000 BC so we're talking 12,000 or so years of history so the bow and arrow is really recent so when most Lee's fit on an error on a shaft they would have fit on the shaft of a spear or maybe a knife handle or something else like that maybe even used as a scraper in some cases but not they would not have fit on the shaft of a of an arrow you're right typical for one year so you mentioned 12,000 years you see over time some very old ones and some new orleans is out you're saying I do Wow and what's fun about this is often some of them less immediately cool-looking things are the oldest or the most intriguing for some reason or another so out of all of these points this one came up really fast is probably the oldest one in the collection and it doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles too much because it's been reworked meaning they used it and used it and it comes smaller and smaller and smaller as they use it and this is called a Dalton I think it's a Dalton point it's from the Lake paleo-indian or the paleo-indian period so that's going to bring us back to some something in the in the realm of 9000 BC 8,000 BC 9,000 years ago something like that so this this particular artifact is that old and that old and it could have been used to what were types of animals that are available at this time back then so elk deer by that time most of the big megafauna mascots and things like that had were extinct by about this time so you're talking about deer this has pretty much always been popular and that's still it's still a case now and it certainly was then but deer elk and things like that we're very important when rocky I'll just speak so you use evidence so you say deer is always better how do you know well I'm our key evidence digging them up so you find them up you find bones in association and some sites bones preserve really well so we can figure out them in some places what they were hunting and deer deer comes up again and again in fact I couldn't help it seeing this and this is made out of bone and maybe that's a deer bone it could be I don't know I know right yeah but it's a good so it is you know so I would have thought that just looking at these like these are so cool isn't this be a projectile point but it's kind of weird you tell us I like the 101 of a projectile point what do you look for you so this is it's big right you can see from the scope of your hand this is kind of a big thing it was probably even bigger probably had some some some size to it and it has a really interesting kind of little feature here and that it's beveled it has this nice beveling shape so as it's being used and worked down you use it and then you resharpen flip it resharpen so you end up with this really cool bevel look to him so when you get it like this you see that it's kind of thick and beveling but it must have been pretty big that's too big to fit on an arrowhead shaft or the shaft of anything to projectile that's why this makes a really good knife this is a classic and you say this is Flint and so Flint will break or have a little flake and so is this from Indiana then you think I believe so I believe so and so these are can you tell by the style then when you see something with notches or points is that tell you it's a certain type of point yes absolutely so throughout the history of archaeology and Indiana in the Midwest in general we've been able to correlate these stylistic changes through time and so now what we have are these kind of reference books or references that tell us when you see this this particular form or or style then it's this kind of point so we have those now throughout our history and archaeology that's interesting you can kind of like we have cars different model so you look at a 50s it's more rounded and that's right and that took a lot of work now so so these do look like arrowheads are these arrow actually these be our lives they are so and that goes to an interesting another point too with a lot of the stylistic changes are because the technology is changing Native Americans very sophisticated hunters very sophisticated and so their technology changed their point styles change that they could do things better and so when the bow and arrow comes into play you don't need a big chunky point like this you need something sleek and in triangle triangle shape triangular shape with this nice thin nice thin cross-section so this would have fit really nicely into the shaft of a true era of true yeah so if someone was throwing a pointed stone what do they throw it that did they didn't use boils how do they get that sphere downrange the atlatl what was that it's addle addle Hamelin addle addle what is manly it's a spear thrower so spear throwers were very effective in fact before the bow and arrow it was the weapon of choice we're not really sure when the atlatl came into being but we see evidence of addle addle use pretty early on especially when we start seeing things like this this is amazing this is this is weird and beautiful all at once and look at that hole there's a hole drilled in this I mean I drill at home I go to the hardware store and buy a drill bit but this was this is old right it's very old and so how does this reference to an atlatl well interestingly enough in archeology they've been found in association with other parts of atlatl so it allows us to put this piece together and what these things are so this is called a banner stone and a banner stone comes in all different kinds of shapes and sizes but the general gist is the same you have kind of a heavier implement that fits on to the end of the atlatl or the spear throwing device and it adds speed and velocity it's basic physics so if you have a spear thrower and you add a weight to it crus imagine three is abortion increases of force and some of these are absolutely beautiful the example here is broken and it's got some things going on maybe it's not quite done yet but it's still a great example some of these are absolutely beautiful concerning these tools that we can make this whole maybe maybe so grinding out holes and things takes a little bit of so you want to look and you kind of want to see how it's going a couple couple ways of grinding holes the first is you take a sand and then you take a reed and you spin and that alone can make a really good hole right then it can and it does fairly well with sand so a lot of shaping and and grinding is actually done using stamps and power-ups and yeah so that's that's my best guest they also had other tools rules where you could different things with them with dirt like a perforator or something through something like this we could perhaps be used so there are a couple of different ways but sand is my best friend for something nice and with a softer material sands a pretty good friend there this could be used to put a hole through another absolutely or starter or the starter part is okay and so we looked at some knives and some of these things are just just beautiful I mean look at this I mean wood what can you tell us about this in looking at it immediately it's probably used during the early to middle woodland period so it's got this nice stem on it this part here is broken but it's a stemmed point so we call that like a middle early the middle woodland stemmed form so this is nice for the end of a spear nice spear on the knees is such a collection there's so much to learn about this where could someone go to to learn me about this well right here at the Indiana State Museum online there's some great references to so I think online is a is a great starting point tell us a little bit about when we switch from hundred gathering here in Indiana to more of a sustained agricultural lifestyle so interestingly people think of corn immediately they you know they think of Native Americans and corn which is very very true but in the Midwest they developed agriculture or growing their own food for much longer than corn kind of like the spirit atlatl versus the the arrow you know corn is pretty recent in before corn Native Americans had learned how to grow their own food grow their own crops such as kina podium and sunflower and even some kinds of gourds so these things were already being grown very successfully in the Midwest for thousands of years so we have the first evidence of this about 3000 BC that they're starting to control the growth of certain native species so by the time you hit this middle woodland period here this point right here so they're really starting to grow their own food kina podium if you go to the store and get quinoa that's very similar it would be very similar to that so corn comes into the picture little bits at a time 600 AD 700 AD it's used it's you starts to increase an increase but before that it was all about kina podium and sunflower and and during the Archaic period and early on they were heavily utilizing nuts and natural resources like that so in the nuts nuts would be more of a hunting more of a more of a gathering type scenario so farming you could almost say farming started with a key Napoleon I would say so a farming up sometimes in archaeology we use farming to mean a large-scale large scale so we say large scale agriculture comes with corn about the Mississippian period just before there just prior to the Mississippian period somewhere in the 1080i Levin hundred ad period smaller scale horticultural farming was done before that was really popular so I would say see ya so there's a possibility that on the Turner farm something has been growing there for about three thousand years for corn that's pretty amazing out I get kind of excited when they showed me this I was thinking that this has got to be for grinding corn I'm not right this looks this looks like it's out fits my hand perfectly and I would grind corn this why you say no well there's a couple of bells and whistles going around in my head do so first off when I look at a piece like this I think to myself was that made that our definition of artifact was it modified by man so I look immediately for evidence of modification and I don't see that so much here I've seen nature I see nature played an evil trick on us and but this is called we call this a do fact or an echo fact geo meaning earth earth made yep it made a trick on us so I go home and polish it then it'll become an artifact then it would become an artifact yourself but I I learned that Native Americans did grind some grain so they didn't use this what did they use well they had something very similar to that so if we have some great examples right over here this is from the State Museum this is from the state museum's collection this is an example both of these are great examples of pestles and that wants to be a pestle that's a nature made pestle these are real pestles these you can see they're really smooth the materialism is not unsimilar it's very hard stone but these are very smooth these are obviously them close together there's a big difference sure so one of the things I like to tell people when they come in and I have to disappoint them and say oh no it's a Nico effect is that it's a really easy mistake to do because nature can play some great tricks on us but when the rule of thumb that I tend to use is that when Native Americans made something to make it they made it and so you can see like the difference between this and this this is smooth it's smooth down it has have a nice groove in the bottom for grinding yeah actually sign oh I can feel the difference this is very smooth compared to out here and I see little looks like a little chipping here and this fits in my hand quite well this I'm and be sore yeah probably that the surface of that is really really rough the surface of this how did that is the surface of that feel and look compared to that good quite smooth and fits my hands so artifact not much of your eyes yeah we'll call that a lever right leave it right out of here yeah so this would you can't tell this was for corn grinding probably not what archaeology knows is that these start coming about and start getting really popular in the archaeological record by about 6,000 BC or so so as the environment changes from that paleo environment cooler climates longer and it starts to change into what our environment is now we have kind of changing of our ecological niches lot what that means is a lot more nuts a lot more vegetation lots more niches that Native Americans could really utilize so we see artifacts like this which reflect a really heightened use of plant material including nuts so these are probably more like for grinding nuts or making that meal something like that these petals absolutely there's so much to learn I mean a person could spend months of not years just on this collection learning about it but I had one more thing I'd like to show you I'm pretty you know I'm pretty sure that this was used for digging in the dirt like a hoe no what would this really use for do you think so interestingly enough that is similar to this in the respect that we start to see these really kind of explode in the archaeological record because you've got trees and think people are staying places longer so that was probably used for woodworking that's probably associated with or built making houses building canoes things like that so probably that wood working of some kind so this is called a huge Calif a Celt and we have a pestle look batter stone huh pottery shard Arrowhead knife sure sure sure okay hey you know I'm gonna call it a drill I like a general perforator because that way journey or for all purpose and all purpose thing just in case yeah well I was kind of disappointed because I know coins important in Indiana and I was hoping this was a home that is not a hoe this is a hoe oh that is how yep so the technology was really sophisticated so when they made something for something they really did it that is a classic hoe found in south south southern Indiana Southwestern Indiana and what what's cool about that is it's made of Turk it's made of the same material that we have over here but if you see on the end yeah it looks polished it absolutely is it was heavily you know oh so it's polished through use use a nice patina okay so this was actually for digging and what crops were associated with this - corn corn that is associated with heavy corn and heavier agriculture and so this was discovered in a site that's and now it's part of the state collection it yeah that is and so this would be direct evidence yep that corn has been around bro kourin was very important absolutely well there's definitely a reason why we're Indiana or land of the Indians you

Channel: WFYI

Views: 264,808

Keywords: Indiana Expeditions, WFYI, Indiana State Museum (Tourist Attraction), Arrowhead

Id: S1w0Za9vSAA

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 20 2015