Indigenous People Have Been Here Forever. Why Won't Archeologists Believe It?

[wnylib]

17. Farmers around here often find artifacts

when they plow or cut down trees. My father grew up on a farm in a very isolated area south of Erie, PA. He saved some of the arrowheads and spearheads that he had found as a child and showed them to me when I was about 8 years old. He also told me about cutting down a tree and finding a tomahawk buried in it, where part of the tree had grown around it.

When I was a child, my older brothers used to take me with them on walks through the woods and down to the creek bed when we visited my grandfather's farm. They enjoyed showing off to me the things that they had learned in Boy Scouts and in their science classes.

Some of the trees on grandpa's farm were very, very old. Not quite virgin forest, but next generation old growth. They showed me a tree stump with a huge circumference and told me that it was a petrified tree stump. In my childish naivete, I thought they meant that the tree had been terrified into the top breaking off. Naturally, they laughed at me, the "dumb girl" who did not know yet what petrified wood meant, but then explained it to me.

We used to find fossils in the creek bed, too, and they explained to me what they were.

So my interest in archaeology started early.