Published: August 15, 2008 12:11 am            

Finding clues to an early culture

About a thousand years ago a Choctaw man crept silently toward a deer that fed unaware on browse growing in northeast Newton County, Mississippi. When the hunter was close enough, the deer turned broadside and the hunter drew his bow and loosed an arrow that tipped a limb and sailed over the deer’s back and into the thicket beyond.

The deer stopped munching for a moment, considering the muted sound of the passing arrow. Sensing no danger, it resumed feeding and the Indian’s next arrow found its mark and the man gave thanks for meat that would feed several of his kind for more than a week.

A thorough search for his first arrow, that stretched to several return trips to the spot, proved fruitless. For it had slipped beneath a mat of leaves as it skidded into the rich topsoil. The hunter became resigned to better spending his time chipping out another arrowhead and preparing a shaft to complete the number of arrows he carried in his deer skin quiver.



Lost but found



But the arrowhead was one day found, its shaft having long ago decayed and become part of the topsoil. The time was in the early years of the 21st century and the hunter was Paul Frink. Frink was not hunting deer, instead he was looking for arrowheads, lost in similar fashion as the one that had been shot toward the browsing deer.

The arrowhead was without a flaw and joined many others in a collection that had been amassed from Frink’s searchings. Like others who collect these relics from the past, Paul is fascinated by the history he sees in every single arrowhead he finds in the woods, fields and streamsides where the Choctaw families lived and thrived in East Mississippi.

“A book I’ve read says when the first white settlers came into this area there was estimated to be about 30,000 Choctaws here,” Frink said. “You go to places where two streams come together and find a high spot, especially with sand where water would not puddle, and that is a likely camp spot,” he noted. Camp spots often yield chips of stone where Indians made their arrowheads. Nearby woods where hunting was common are good places to look for lost arrowheads.

In one of these campsites, Paul made a very interesting find. He dug up an arrowhead that was almost finished but had been broken by its maker, possibly while not holding the correct pressure on it as he chipped it with a deer antler. The arrowhead had split lengthwise in a distinct S shape. Searching the area some distance away he found the part that had been broken away.

It fits perfectly, like a puzzle piece, to form the almost finished arrowhead.



Replaying

the incident



Envisioning the bygone scene, Frink believes the arrowhead maker was disgusted with his error and in anger threw the larger piece remaining in his hand, perhaps exclaiming some Choctaw profanity during the toss. This would explain the distance between the two pieces.

Trying to figure the actions of the people of those times that caused the arrowheads, spear points, pottery and other remnants of their culture to be in a certain place is a part of the pleasure Paul gets from his endeavors. “When I pick up an arrowhead, I know I am the first human to touch it since someone who made it centuries ago,” he says with a sense of awe. Such knowledge cannot help but inspire intriguing insight into the fascinating lives of the admired people who lived here long ago and have survived through the ages.

Paul Frink became interested in hunting arrowheads upon fining several as a youngster around his father’s farm. An Indian camp had been nearby long before and pieces of pottery and arrowheads appeared behind plows that prepared the land for growing crops. Now he uses a masonry trowel and probes to help him search beneath the soil where he finds those small pieces of stone and clay that once were in possession of people whose relics fascinate us today.

        

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