Vert Identification

[Shellseeker]

I had a fantastic day yesterday afternoon, visiting and viewing artifacts and fossil private collections from the Peace River watershed. I was hosted by some true experts who also had fantastic collections spanning the last 30-40 years and I was accompanied by some TFF friends. Gorgeous and rare artifacts, a lots of Bone Valley Megs, rare Peace River fossils and even had time in the mid afternoon to practice toss lances with a Atatl stick into Archery targets.

A cold icy draft after the exercise and a bunch of good memories.  I never take enough photos, but did promise to attempt an identification.

So, a native artifact sticking through a section of backbone. My question is which animal has a vertebrae section that looks like this....

 

Sorry about photos -- but you do get to see some reed and willow "arrows" with replaceable darts in the background.

 

All comments appreciated.  Jack

[Al Dente]

Looks like a sacrum. Was this item one he found or purchased? The reason I ask is this was very popular item to fake back in the late 80s and early 90s. Rock shops were selling animal vertebrae with projectile points sticking in them.

[Shellseeker]

The vast majority of this particular collection was purchased. Basically, for about 40 years , he advertised in various ways that he was in the market to purchase native artifacts and was especially interested in artifacts locally ( which translated to the Peace River watershed between Punta Gordo and Bartow Florida.

He freely admits that , in the beginning, while he was inexperienced,  that some % of his purchases were bogus but he always compensated by refusing to pay large amounts of money for any artifact unless it could be certified as authentic by a recognized Florida state expert,  like Carlos Tatum.

He would not have paid a lot of money for this. Even validating the point would not guarantee validity for the bone. 

My only goal is to identify the animal to which the sacrum belongs. At first I was thinking 'deer" but horse may be more likely. Thanks for the response.  Jack

[caldigger]

That's a really neat bone knife in the first pic.