What is this stone and what are the lines??

[autographcollector11]

Hi all,

This is more of a geology question but the attached item is sandstone. I don't think sandstone is known for fossils-us it? Anyway the attached lines in the stone intrigue me. I was told these may be from a glacier. Someone said a plow but where it was found was never plowed but on a Native American site.

Anyway , are these grooved fossils, glacial or man made such as abrading?

[fossiling]

there are fossils in sandstone.

[DNF]

1 hour ago, autographcollector11 said:

 Someone said a plow but where it was found was never plowed but on a Native American site.

 

This does look an awful lot like plow scars. I don't know anything about the history of agriculture in your area, but native sites I worked on in new england were very commonly affected. 

 

Native American site and European agriculture aren't necessarily mutually exclusive 

[caldigger]

Most glacial abrading (scaring) I am familiar with is usually in one direction.  Think of the stone, locked in ice and drug along the bedrock on the valley floor as the glacier advances.  Similar to locking a stone in a vice and setting it to a rough sanding wheel.

You state it was found in a native peoples site. Perhaps your piece was used to strike or pound something like a hammer.

[caldigger]

1 hour ago, DNF said:

This does look an awful lot like plow scars. I don't know anything about the history of agriculture in your area, but native sites I worked on in new england were very commonly affected. 

 

Native American site and European agriculture aren't necessarily mutually exclusive 

However, I don't believe native Americans ( likely Inuit's ) utilized the metal plow heads that would be needed to scrape rocks like that. They would have used wooden plows. And correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think they were an Agrarian society.

[DNF]

7 minutes ago, caldigger said:

 

You state it was found in a native peoples site. Perhaps your piece was used to strike or pound something like a hammer.

Hammerstones are, I think, the archaeologist's equivalent of dinosaur eggs. Unless it's found in situ with debitage it's just another rock 

 

10 minutes ago, caldigger said:

However, I don't believe native Americans utilized the metal plow heads that would be needed to scrape rocks like that. They would have used wooden plows.

Native Americans who raised crops practiced horticulture. The plow was introduced by europeans. If these are plow scars they were produced by European technology.

[caldigger]

We're talking Alaska.  We need to determine what is the age if this Native American site it was found in.  European influence in that area wasn't prevalent until the early 19th century.

[autographcollector11]

This was from southeast Wisconsin. The site is late woodland/early Mississippian.

[caldigger]

OK, assumed (ya I know!) it was from Alaska given your location. My bad.  Given this, I wouldn't discount the plow.  Maybe not recently, but it may have been by settlers back in the day.

[sagacious]

It's certainly an interesting rock. The marks to not appear to have a fossil origin, and likewise don't appear to be typical glacial striations on a stone plucked from bedrock.

 

However, there's a long list of ways those marks could have been made. The rock could have been run over by atv's or wheeled vehicles, or by snowmobiles; it could have been sharply incised by ice-breakup along a river; it might have been incised and abraded by a landslide or rockfall or icefall or debris flow. It could have been abraded by cutting tools during tree cutting, or during mining/prospecting, road/trail-building, excavation of a borrow pit, or by simple digging with a shovel/tool at a campsite; etc, etc.

 

It's an intriguing stone, but often there's very little that one can do to substantiate the provenance and cause of marks of that sort. For what it's worth, as DNF noted, the markings do look a lot like plow scars.

[Raggedy Man]

You live in Alaska yes? Some times lines in a rock are just from glacial deposition and the movement of the glacier carving. Many of the erratic glacial stones we find here in Wisconsin share those types of grooves.

[fifbrindacier]

That's an interesting discussion. I live in a glacial valley, and some stones we have bears striations like these.

[caldigger]

11 hours ago, autographcollector11 said:

This was from southeast Wisconsin. The site is late woodland/early Mississippian.

He clarified the location this piece was found.