Artifact Recovery

We had found a Cortaro point (arrowhead) (3500-2100 B C) on a site in the Cienega Preserve.

I took a picture of it and sent the site report with the picture to the Land Manager.

I was so surprised when the Land Manager e-mailed me back asking if we could go back to the site and recover the point.

Yikes!

We have seen many of these points the Preserve, so I had not taken a GPS reading of the point only the picture.

We have never been asked to recover an artifact from the Preserve.

I emailed the Land Manager back saying we would give it a try but it would be a ‘needle in the haystack’ situation I feared, as the site is huge.

I asked the crew to have their lunches with them as we could be a long time on this search.

We planned to do a really tight ‘shoulder to shoulder’ sweep of the area for the point.

On site we stopped to put up flagging tape at the start of the ‘thought it is about here” area.

There it was at boot tip!

We had been on site less than 10 minutes!

Of course, we had a good laugh and high fives went all around!

Incredible!