A joke

 Yeah...I used to smoke for a living.

A pretty little bighorn sheep kill zone

This is right above my little hill in Nevada:

It's a 608 ft climb from the valley floor at 3000 ft. 

I am so intrigued by the pink color of the lithic debris, completely different from what is in use at the foot of the hill.

Competitive Artifact Hunting

Here, effectively in private, I can admit that I find arrowhead hunting with your buddies to be a YouTube genre that pisses me off. These guys are down in the Carolinas in places where there are so many arrowheads, all you have to do to find them is look down. They go out in a team and bring home dozens of arrowheads. Each find is accompanied by loud shouts of "Wow its a screamer"..."its a SMOKER"...etc. Or "Aww buddy you got skunked".

These guys understand nothing and teach nothing to the viewer. They do not tell you the materials, the arrowhead styles, any info about the topography. When arrowhead hunting is about picking up the next trinket, then the arrowheads become correspondingly low valued. You do not need to think about or understand prehistory. When I spend months without finding anything, then a single arrowhead becomes very precious - whether or not I communicate that on YouTube. It is not about shouting and competing with your buddies. I have enough pain of loss during those empty months. For me, there is intellectual effort behind the finds - not that I necessarily succeed. The effort makes me aware of things that may help me understand what I am finding.

A day of arrowhead hunting

Sometimes on a good day you find more than one arrowhead. The ensemble takes on a particular life of its own: the life of that day in the field. Each time you go out you have the focus that you bring to the moment and you have the conditions that are there anyway. Out of this and mother luck come a find or two, a deep sense of accomplishment and a frame captured by the arrowheads. I love the stems on these arrowheads:

Or

Woo hoo! Thank you Rhode Island.

First crocus 2024

Note the date. It was Feb 11the last year. So 2 days earlier.

Ridgelines in Nevada

As you walk along a ridgeline in Nevada you had well look down and keep an eye out for arrowheads. Wherever sheep crossed or followed the ridge, hunters have waited - one time or another.

Some kind of Hebbian Principle

Suppose you have a category of things, that all fall under a name - say - "A". If there is an observable of these things that allows the As to be divided into two groups; then the observable becomes an attribute of As. Two sub-categories are created. 

If we lived in a binary world, every type of thing would correspond to one such observable.