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Good video - I'd seen him build his house before. Thanks for sharing.
One Spring I was one of a half dozen archaeologists doing a survey for the Park Service in the Delaware Water Gap Recreation Area in New Jersey. It was late in the day, and I was looking forward to digging my last test hole and getting back to town for dinner and a few beers. We began that morning down near the floodplain of the Delaware River, digging small test holes every 100' if it was reasonably flat, following the banks of a shallow drainage up slope.
We had made it to the top of the hill, and the rest of the crew had separated from me in some light woods and grassy clearings. We were working individually, digging and throwing a few shovelfuls of soil at a time into a screen, then picking the screen up and sifting it to search for artifacts. It had been a long discouraging day, as no one had any luck. But it was warm and sunny, so we had that going for us.
I picked up my screen for what I hoped was almost the last time, and shook the dirt out to see a rock that looked very much like the first one used in the video to make the ax handle - it was narrower than the ax. It was what we called a celt, and the first (and only) one I ever found. Beautiful blue gray, with nicely polished and unblemished edges at both ends. I finished digging to "sterile" soil, found nothing else, wrote up my results, and went to tell my crew chief.
I found the rest of the crew finishing up and gathering to go back to Milford, and told my boss what I'd found. He didn't believe me, until I showed it to him. This meant we had to go back and dig additional tests around the find site, and since we had reached the end of our planned work in that direction, we had to do it that afternoon. My fellows' congratulations at my good luck were a little restrained, as we retraced our steps.
We ended up digging 11 additional tests. We found one more celt in an adjacent hole 10 meters away, and had to dig the others to satisfy the testing requirements. There was nothing in any of the other tests. We got home just before dark, and drank a lot of beer that night, trying to figure out what those isolated celts were doing up there on that hill top above the Delaware.
