by Kenneth S. Hill, Booneville, Mississippi
Volume 66, Number 1, January 2019 Central States Archaeological Journal
Figure 1. Owl effigy pendant found in two parts and reunited after five years.
It was a cold fall day in 2017 and I was in the creek at the Buddies site in Prentiss County, northeast Mississippi. Now this site is called Buddies because myself and my three hunting friends have all hunted artifacts there for as long as I have been buying rocks.
I was introduced to the site by my oldest friend Jamie Hutchins, who in turn had taken Jason Seward there. Now this creek has put out some pretty serious artifacts from Mid Archaic to Mississippian in about five different zones of the overall site. In fact, Jason and Jamie were featured in an article in this very journal in 2013.
Back in 2015, Jason was in the creek and found a piece of green banded slate that had been drilled and worked. It was about an inch and a half squared. To me it looked almost like a machine cog. Jamie had said that he thought it was an owl effigy pendant, but I had a hard time seeing it.
The only thing of interest I found was a piece of green banded slate about the size of a quarter. It was clearly worked on three sides that looked like wings, with the fourth side broken off. I knew it was something, so I put it in my pocket and kept on going. I pulled out two nice points, one was a Morrow Mountain Rounded Base and the other was a Pickwick, both being from the Middle Archaic period. The sun going down, and I pulled one last point out. It was a Little Bear Creek point from the Late Archaic period and it had a super tip to it.
As I was leaving I sent Jamie a text with a picture asking him if he knew what the little piece of green banded slate might be. He got back with me pretty much immediately saying he thought it was the missing half of an owl effigy pendant that he had found five years earlier at about the same spot in the creek. He came by the next day with the other half, shaking so bad from excitement in the hope it might be the other half.
Amazingly, it was (Fig. 1)! We both were astonished, Buddies site had done it again. Jamie said “It’s the creek that keeps on giving” and he is right!
Figure 2. Arrowheads found the same day the half of the Owl pendant was uncovered.
Figure 3. Additional green slate artifacts found at same site. These were approximately 20 feet from where the pendant was found. These include a large worked gorget upper left, at upper right an undrilled pendant and at lower left a small celt.
References
Cooper, Steven R.
2013 Creek Hunting in Mississippi. Central States Archaeological Journal 60 (1): 27–29.