Yuku free message boards

Hi Folks,
I was at the Calico site over the weekend, and a geologist said they found the black matte over on Santa Rosa Island at the Arlington Springs site. They are checking now to see if it is at the Calico site itself because they are digging the Rock Wren site which had a C14 date of 14ky.

Firestone's book is a gas! I am reading it again.

Nice photos Charlie.

Chris

re: "They got everything in this collection."
Sorry. I should have said, everything but spearheads and arrowheads.

re: "Well sure, anyone can pick out the cherries from 60,000 specimens".


Y'know, this is what you hear -- A LOT!

Yet, not one single debunker has come forward showing another natural-geofact site where this is true. Consider all of the natural flint/chert outcrops in the entire world the debunkers have to chose from. And yet, after 40 years of Calico lithics -- and you would think that the debunkers would have been looking -- there has been no other candidate that has ever yielded the kinds of "geofacts" that the debunkers so easily and so glibly claim are just normal wear and tear you find at any chert source/outcrop. In fact, there are plenty of great geofacts in the Calico collection itself; some are natural, weathered spalls that you would swear were actually blades unless you are familiar with the signatures of fracture mechanics. And, there are indeed actual blades in the collection as well. It is complex and in many ways the subtleties can be confusing. Our job right now is to put the collection on some type of friendly footing that will allow in depth analysis in the years to come.

It is great that the idea of geofacts is posited as a hypothesis, but to rest on that hypothesis as "proof" of geofact-ness is not only bad science, but whoever does it is pretty much an air-head because that is all a hypothesis is -- air, i.e. an idea, a test, something imagined that has to be tested, something you can do on your couch. Yet not one single other chert or flint resource has been found in the Old or New World with anything close to the type of variability you find at Calico. I mean, you mention that for the debunkers, the fact that there are only 26 images may imply that we have only cherry picked the best, that the rest of the "things" pulled out of hill are all hokie and not worth publishing because they sour the case of artifact-hood. That could be an argument, I suppose.

Given most debunkers like to criticize at a distance and don't bother even looking through the boxes themselves, we hope to remedy that situation through a series of extensive photographic examinations. For example, what about 26 graver specimens, all with isolation flakes (small notches) that help isolate the graver element -- these are small notches on either side of the graver element -- a very common practice in the world of graver-dom. Thing is, we could probably double or quadruple the number of "alleged" gravers we have based on the presence of these double-notched isolation features alone. This is true for other delicate features on a number of different artifact types, such as reamers and denticulates. Once we get through the basic classification stage, this will be a top priority.

Now I admit, some of the confusion over Calico has come from the fact that there are only a few publications out there, most all available through the SBCM, and are still very good, but circulation is scant. Also, over the decades, the Calico project was besieged with financial problems and endured complicated situations with respect to the state and federal status of the actual site and its preservation. These were all because the professional community at large did not back up the Calico project and in the end it seems to have been relegated to a status of historical value only -- like perhaps, being the greatest archaeological folly of all time?? (well, perhaps Piltdown Man was greater.) In fact, there are still local university professors here in SoCal that warn their students that when they do research and write papers, if they choose Calico they will get "F"s. So we have our work cut out for us, and the archaeological community definitely deserves a good dose of specific information that has never seen the light of day. Hopefully the photographic project will help to remedy current apprehensions, or maybe even increase them to the point that the geofactsters will have to finally get off the couch and provide actual material evidence for their claims. We'll see. Hopefully some new views of the artifacts will be posted by the end of summer.

Chris