Group provides identification services for items found in ground

SHEFFIELD — Ohio hides a lot of secrets just beneath its soil. This weekend curious seekers will have a chance to find out what they may have unearthed. Firelands Archaeology is hosting its annual Artifact ID Day from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday at the Lorain County Metro Parks French Creek Nature Center, 4530 Colorado Ave., Sheffield. The event is free and visitors are welcome to drop by with up to 10 specimens to be examined by the group's volunteer experts, said Brian Redmond, director of archaeology for the group and curator emeritus of archaeology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Amy Margaris, the group's director and associate professor of anthropology at Oberlin College, is also one of the members who will be identifying artifacts. The group, founded in 1990, has held the event for the past several years and usually draws 40 to 50 people who've found prehistoric and Native American artifacts while gardening in their yard, fishing along creek beds or sometimes in their own homes. "There's always someone who comes in and says 'Grandpa had this box of arrowheads, I always wondered what they are and how old they were,'" he said. Some people look at them differently once they know they're an ancient artifact, and they're a lot more important to them." "Most people want to bring in things they find in their garden that look like an arrowhead, or something that looks like a stone tool," he said. "A lot of things are from about 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, and they're amazing and interesting but frankly a lot of those things aren't that uncommon — flint knives, projectile points, stone points." In 2020, a local man brought in something that stopped all conversation. Paul Kasten was walking his family land west of the Vermilion River after the spring rains when he spied something that anyone else could have easily stepped over, Redmond said. But Kasten had walked the fields for years, looking at bits of rock and bone. "If someone wasn't familiar with these types of artifacts you'd think it is just a stone. It is stone, but it's flint and it's been worked. But a collector knows what to look for. It's silica stone, and it's fine-grained and it's shiny, Redmond said. Kasten brought it in to an Artifact ID Day and the experts gasped. It was a Clovis point, a fluted projectile point used for hunting dating back 13,000 years and very rare. They are some of the earliest evidence of human life in the Americas. He co-authored a research paper with the group, and now sits on its board. "It's hard to conceive of something that old, but I see it as part of our heritage. It's part of everybody's cultural heritage," he said. Ohio is a particularly rich area for artifacts. Last year another Clovis point was brought in, this time by a man who said he'd found it a long time ago at the end of the Lofton Henderson Memorial Bridge in Lorain. Redmond said the man told the group experts that there had been construction going on at the time, and sometimes artifacts have been known to surface out of the soil from construction work or the erosion of time. While it's unknown when the man discovered the point, the bridge opened in 1940. "Ohio has some of the best preserved Clovis sites in the country, some of the largest on record, providing a lot of information on ancient people," he said. There are about 25 to 30 members in Firelands Archaeology, which works to discover, document and preserve archaeological sites from Elyria to Sandusky to the west side of Cleveland. It hosts events to teach the public about the pre-history and the native populations of northern Ohio. Contact Rini Jeffers at rinijeffers@gmail.com.