November 05th, 2020

'Look what Tim found!  An Arrowhead!  Wow!  He spied it earlier this week when we were doing the noonwalk so it's not as if we were hiking through the woods and found it there in what would seem to be it's natural habitat.  Nope he picked it up from where it lay,  right in the middle of the street.  So  it's probably  not an ancient historic arrowhead or anything.  And there is no obvious explanation for how it happened to be in the middle of Bayshore Dr.  And yet there it was.  

I really don't care what's it's true provenance is, I still think it's exceedingly cool.  And naturally  my mind wanders to all sorts of possibilities.  Come on, if you see an arrowhead doesn't your imagination immediately go to Native Americans from hundreds of years ago?  Mine surely does.

I don't know a great deal about the Southwest Florida Indigenous People but I am aware of the Calusa Indians who lived here.  They were the inhabitants of a large portion of Southwest Florida for a very long time and their influence spread throughout Florida, even to the east coast.  They were a very fierce people who fought off European invasion successfully for many years.   The word Calusa is said to mean, "Fierce People" and they were. In fact, the famous Juan Ponce de Leon was killed by a Calusa attack.

As I read further I learned that the Calusa subsisted mostly on net fishing.  The garbage heaps that they left behind, called shell middens, are made up primarily of shell and fish bones and things made out of shells and fish bones.  And one of the things that they made from shell is projectile points for arrows.  It seems that they did not make arrow points from rock. So this is not a Calusa Indian Arrowhead.  

Ratz. That's kind of disappointing.  But I read further. The Calusa did trade with other Native Americans so I suppose it's possible that it came from a different group?

Or more likely it was some kid who read about making arrowheads and tried it out for themselves.  Dang, talk about bringing me down to earth with a bang.  It was a lot more fun, more romantic, more entertaining to think that Tim had discovered a bit of history, an artifact.  Not for any supposed money value.  Not even close.  Just for the novelty of it.  Novel to me anway.  I never owned an arrowhead before.  (Tim found it and promptly handed it to me which makes it now mine)

So now it sits on my desk and I find myself often picking it up and running my thumb across the surface of it while I am reading an email or composing a blogpost or listening to an interview through my headphones.  It seems to be the perfect fidget for me.




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