So I'm interested to know what sort of evidence of past human activity might be lurking in the backyards of the world.
Where I live there has been a human presence for thousands of years, but very little to show for it until recently. See here a couple photos of flint arrowheads, spearheads, and a scraper that were found here and there around our house and plowed fields nearby:
I'm no expert on identifying which period they might be from, but here is a diagram from which possible identifications may be made:
What's interesting is that flint does not naturally occur in abundance in this particular area, which means most of the pieces we find have been brought here from a hand-dug quarry about 60 miles to the south. Also, since there weren't permanent settlements in this area at that time, these pieces just accumulated over many many years of random hunting intervals.
There have been a few different cultural periods that have existed in this area (think of them as stoneage versions of the Urnfield, Hallstatt, or La Tène cultures), all of which passed to the next and faded away. It's generally believed they disappeard (meaning absorbed) into the later woodland cultures which were here when the Europeans arrived. By then the natives were far different from these early cultures, and had begun to use the modern technology of the day, so these flint projectiles were just a forgotten piece of their past. The Shawnee tribe was the most influential in this area around that time (a lot of towns and counties still bear Shawnee names), but they were pressed by other tribes coming from the East (Delaware, Erie, etc.). I think today most of the remaining Shawnee are in Oklahoma.
This must be boring compared to what our European comrades have to show.
