"Can I touch history?" one of my daughters asked me.
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She said it as I held a chiseled white piece of quartz in my palm and told her I thought it was likely an arrowhead fashioned on this spot more than 400 years ago by a vanished and vanquished race of man.
As I primed the girls for their first Indian artifact hunt, I had worried they would find trudging through muddy farm fields looking for small stones of a certain configuration not magical, as I do, but only tedious and boring.
Another one of Dad's odd and usually empty-handed adventures, like searching under trees for tight balls of fur regurgitated by owls, or sifting through backwash at the beach for shark's teeth.
I have found my share of American Indian artifacts without really looking. I came across my first arrowhead digging the foundation of a house in Ohio as a teen. What excitement and pondering that set off.
Had this been all that was left of an arrow shot at a deer or other game by a warrior that had stalked through what was likely a forest at the time? Had the shot missed its mark and the arrow broken and never been retrieved? How did it get 3 feet underground?
A few years later, I was hunting deer in western Virginia. Walking through a clearing, I looked down and — as visible as if it had just been laid there — was a round bowl carved out of stone.
It now sits on my bedroom dresser and gives me a thrill almost daily.
About 10 years ago, I spent several idle summer afternoons sifting the bottom of an ebbing Conestoga River where it passes the old Rocky Springs Park.
I was looking for amusement park artifacts. Not once, but twice, I unfurled my hand to find perfect arrowheads.
Probably from missed shots at sunning fish in what was then a clear river, I speculated, and was thrilled at the image.
Years later, those and other arrowheads were donated to a Navajo tribe for use in rituals. My oldest daughter had done volunteer work with them and, strangely enough, she was told there was a shortage of genuine Native American artifacts for use in traditional ceremonies.
Now, I wanted to share the thrill of the hunt with our daughters. At the same time, I wanted it to be steeped in history and even with an air of solemnity, given the way we treated the last Native Americans in Lancaster County.
I knew that the slopes of present-day Washington Boro once was a community of about 1,600 Susquehannocks between 1600 and 1625.
I lucked into a tomato farmer who told me of two small fields he had just plowed. Wait for a rain to expose rocks, he advised.
We arrived in early afternoon on a recent, raw day and began a slow, methodical march back and forth.
Layers of history peeled away for us. We found old, hand-forged nails — likely from the barns that recently had been torn down.
Near Water Street, the plow had churned up red bricks from a sidewalk that once ran in front of riverfront homes.
I began finding flakes of white quartz. I knew from volunteer archaeological work in Utah ,documenting artifacts of ancient people that lived 8,000 years ago, that there were stations where points for darts used in atlatls were mass produced.
Sure enough, among an area of quartz flakes I found three imperfect arrowheads. I wonder what the weapon maker had uttered when he/she screwed up and tossed aside the rejects.
Surely, not in his wildest dreams, could he have imagined that his perfunctory work would be so cherished centuries later.
I found a dark, 3-inch stone that had been worked. A spear point? And a long, smooth river rock that just may have been used for grinding grains.
We also unearthed several large bones, giving us a jolt of perverse excitement. Perverse because would you want some stranger sifting through your bones or an ancestor's?
All but one were large bones, probably from a cow or horse or mule housed in the barns, I figured. But, not a quarter-mile from here, a recent archaeological excavation had uncovered the bones of black bears and wolves.
The girls did get bored sifting through the freshly harrowed clods of dirt and frustrated at constantly being told that the rocks in their hands were just that.
But yet, with those four words, "Can I touch history?" Hannah had perfectly caught the essence of what we were doing: The magic of reaching back in time and making a connection to the ghosts of our past.
acrable@lnpnews.com
