Potsherds?

There seem to be a lot of abandoned Indian dwellings in Arizona, and I often hear people talking about finding pottery or arrowheads out in the desert. I've never run across anything like that myself, though. Maybe it's because I don't know what to look for, though you would think that after looking at millions of rocks I might notice if something didn't look quite like a rock should look.

A guy I work with showed me on a map where he had found some pottery fragments once. I went out there to take a look. I found about a dozen small pieces of what I'm guessing used to be pottery.

Is this a potsherd?

Edge view of one piece.

I hear that you aren't supposed to disturb any such artifacts, much less take them. I only touched two pieces. Well, how do you know it isn't a rock until you look at it? I carefully put those two back the way I found them. I've decided that I won't reveal the location on the slim chance that somebody reads my blog and also that that somebody likes to pilfer Native American artifacts.

It was a beautiful day when I was out there. I got some nice landscape pictures. They would gives hints about the location, though, so you'll never see them here. I did include some pictures of a rock outcropping, but there are cairns in the area so anybody that gets close enough to recognize the rock pictures was probably going to that spot anyway and knows what is there. Click below to see some more of the pictures.

2013_01_13