Arrowhead & Pottery sherd hunting St. Francisville, LA area

Man good luck to you. I’m dying to find my first arrowhead on my land. I have found several pottery sherds but no luck with the arrowheads. Rock hounding and artifact hunting creeks is s a great way to spend an afternoon

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Does anyone have any places in that area (or elsewhere) they can suggest?

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Just as a heads up, disturbing historical artifacts on public land is illegal. I'm not judging or commenting on the ethics of it, just an fyi to be aware if you're on anything other than private land that you have permission to search.

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Does anyone have any places in that area (or elsewhere) they can suggest?

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I have a real neat amphitheater shaped hill around a small mound on our property. I’ve found plenty of shards and arrowheads around it.

I’m 100% convinced there’s a lot more around that physical feature and I’d love to have it LiDAR’d one day.

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there is little historical value to the finds. Everything ends up in a box in the closet or a shadowbox

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My father collected lots of indian and civil war era stuff. It just sits lays around collecting dust or hidden away in the closets. Not sure what I'm going to do with this stuff one day when it becomes mine.

That center one is amazing! Crazy to think that those could have been made thousands of years apart

Yep , these were found on a sandy area , very seldom find them this intact. This is all I hunt anymore.

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Sounds like you don't need our help, but some of us might need yours. Are these all creek finds or you roam freshly plowed fields after a good rain?

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chiming in, we don't have many ag fields around my parts to hunt, but when I do, they're usually busted. the plow is hard on airyheads. I'll tell you how I do it as an experienced rock hound.

no ag fields leaves it up to mostly creek hunting for us. although, anytime I'm around broken, exposed soil I'm looking because they're everywhere. I have some real honey hole creeks, some with ones here or there, and even have a couple that aren't chock full of points, but the ones I find are early paleo points- the ones that actually have a little value (maybe). if you find a small, deep ditch with steep sides and a rocky bottom, it might be ancient. there probably won't be many there, but watch out for the gooduns. they'll usually be small.

unless you're gonna be digging and screening and are only surface hunting, any creek with rock bars is a good starting point. not because they have more points, but because the points get caught up on the bar and are easier to spot.

in the south, i love to hunt the late winter/early spring. the time between deer season end and early March is prime artifact hunting season in my opinion. less cottonmouths (it's amazing how easy it is to get up on one when you're dialed in), the water is clear, and rains have had a chance to clear out the leaf litter. if you can't see the ground you can't hunt.

hunt big picture and small, slow down your eyes. i start where the current is/was obvious, then work my way back up to the highest point on the bar. walk down and back, because a different perspective can make all the difference. oftentimes all you'll see is a tiny tip or a sliver of a shoulder. don't just key in on color. look for a difference in saturation and color value. it sounds counterintuitive,
but hunting in early morning/late evening is the best time. oftentimes the patina of a point in earth tones will glow in low light. other times you'll find a heat treated point or shiny piece made of chert or quartzite and it'll just pop out to the untrained eye. also look for shapes. when you get good, seeing the anomalies of unnatural manmade shapes among thousands of natural rocks is when you'll find more. don't let a mortar and pestle pass you by because you were aiming small. that's also how you get up on a cottonmouth looking too small. you train your eyes to "zoom" in and out and you'll find more points. don't forget to look for pottery shards too- they'll be obvious.

on cottonmouths: before I hunt any area over meticulously, I've found that I concentrate better if I start by scanning the entire area where i can see bare ground for snakes. what you'll wind up doing is hunting for snakes instead of rocks. it really does take trained concentration to be effective. it's one reason why artifact hunting and meth use are interconnected: the points have some monetary/bartering value, and they can key in for hours combing the landscape with intense focus. you'd be surprised how many LEOs red flag artifact hunting with meth use.

any time a big flood comes and the water recedes, get out and hunt. if any erosion has happened along the banks that's even better. that's when the smokers show up.

after awhile you'll stop keeping the shards and bits and pieces. I always like leaving various size ones and making mental notes of their location and seeing how they respond to high water conditions. it's amazing how long a piece of rock aerodynamically shaped and thick as a quarter can stay put in a 50 ft section of rock bar.

and if you ever find a good spot, even if you know it's 100% yours to hunt, don't tell anyone where it is. you'd be surprised who'll come in there and hunt it. rock hunting is addictive as hell. there's no better feeling than getting down in that creek for the first hunt of the year giddy as a kid on Christmas morning, hunting a bar, and then BAM, there she is: the last man to handle that point was 5000 years prior. once you gather enough you can make a shadow box. they're pretty bad arse looking when you know you found them and they all have a story- the one you know and the ones you can only speculate about. I don't do it like I used to, but I've been known to piss away half a turkey season hunting artifacts because the hunting was just too good.

and most trained archeologists absolutely despise amateur artifact hunters. many times they have good reason, but if you find one who is willing to give you some information on your points, keep them in good regards. otherwise, don't even try. if it were up to them it'd be illegal to even as so much look at a surface artifact on private land, regardless of the fact it has zero archeological value.

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it has zero archeological value.

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Yeah this is the problem with your entire statement and rational.

With all due respect, unless someone is a trained archeologist, you really don't have the ability to say if there is or isn't any archeological value to a site or a find.

I don't have a problem with people hunting artifacts on their own land or someone's land where they've been invited. I've put more than 1 arrowhead from private land in my pocket over the years. But that doesn't mean those artifacts and sites where they were found don't have archeological value. The only way to know that is to do a proper dig on the site, and most archeologists and institutions don't have the resources to dig all of these areas.

I get what you're saying. Most of the time the value in a site is it's provenance, or it's position in the landscape. And yes, many times when hunting in plowed fields or creeks that provenance has been disturbed. but there is still info that trained archeologists can glean from looking at artifacts. For example, when clovis points were found at the Topper site in South Carolina it made it 1 of only 2 cloivs sites found on the Atlantic Coastal Plain of North America. The provenance had initially been disturbed, but the mere presence of those artifacts on that site made it unique and of archeological value.

Just remember that creeks are private

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There is no problem with my statement or rationale. Creek finds of pottery sherds and points have such little archaeological value, partially due to the abundance and partially due to lack of chronological information once they've been washed into the waterway. And I am educated in the field.

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Not 100% true. You simply trace the artifacts back upstream to you find where they're eroding from the bank. There's your site location.