I had a couple of hours before having to go into the office Sunday
March 18 2001, so I thought I would get out into the fields for a while. Darrell came by and we lit out in the
later morning a few miles from my house in Hancock County Indiana to a field that I had hunted for a few hours
a week earlier after work and found some broken relics. We only had a few hours again this day, so we could not
drive far. We had just gotten into the field and we had both found some flakes on the first rise. I found a very nice thumb scraper made out of Ohio flint ridge material and a nice Table Rock point made of Harrison County flint. We then were walking in the bottoms to the second rise and talking. As we started up the rise where the ground conditions changed to more clay, we started seeing a few flakes. I was walking north westerly to the top of the plateau area where I had seen some flakes in my earlier hunt.
As we were walking and talking, I spotted a flake out of the corner of my right eye. As I bent around and down to pick it up for inspection, I saw the side of the adz on the side of a large dirt clump.
Only the upper side portion of the adz was visible, the rest being in the dirt. It had frosted heavily that previous night and the ground was fairly wet so the contrast was very good between the soil and rocks.
I stuck my stick into the dirt above the adz and poked the very top out with a gentle push. As the top angled out of the dirt clod, I knew it was a nice and complete relic. I yelled over to Darrell who came over and pulled it free from the ground. We later talked about how weird it is to know before pulling a relic out of the ground that it is either broken or complete. This occurs on a regular basis.
I spoke to Darrell last night for a while. He had found three small broken relic pieces that day, in about 4 hours of surface hunting. I had found the complete adz, a thumb scraper made of high grade Flintridge material, a 2.5 inch serrated side notch made Harrison county, a very thin 2" base notch made out of local chert, and a snapped base serrated point made of Ohio Coshocton Chert.