My brother in law and his buddy (lifelong), and My wife and I used to ge each year to Elk Camp, a public lands primitive ( dispersed camping) site for a month during Oregon Archery season. Elk, deer, and bear/cougar. While there, the boys would sit around camp in the evening, or mid day, chipping arrowheads with obsidian and old bottles, Made some beautiful points of all styles. Broken pieces or failed pieces or even partially made experimental work, would just be dropped into a midden pile, there is our camp site. When we’d come back in summer for our scouting trip and to put up tree stands, most of the pieces would be gone.
On a trip through there on my way to Idaho, I happened to swing by our camp, during rifle season (much later than archery) “Our” camp was full of RV’s. I stopped to visit a bit, and told them we used the same camp, during archery season and asked how they liked it. they told me a great story about how the Indians had used this camp for centuries, and after the snows, old shards and middens would surface for them to find, when they got to camp in the late fall. “Centuries?” I asked them,
Yup, they were certain they’d stumbled on an ancient Indian campground. I didn’t tell them that was us. I used to wonder why we never found any of our scrap flakes when we returned.
