Flying in, seeing the alluvial fans spreading out from the valleys at the feet of the mountains, I was trying to figure out how long it would take for the deposits to accumulate and thinking that early man, if he lived along those streams, would have left his stone tools behindl but that they would be pretty deeply buried after not too long a while. So I was thinking if I was going to hunt for stone tools down there, I would have to look in places where there was recent erosion.

And then flying down into the lush green flatlands that developed into neighborhoods and then the cities of Silicon Valley - San Jose, Santa Clara, Cupertino - I was thinking: "gee that is a lot of accumulated mud around the southern end of San Fransisco bay; and there are no fast flowing rivers to cut down through the mud and expose lower layers." So I figured huting for stone tools down there would be hopeless.

When I landed and took a cab from the airport to my hotel, the Santa Clara Marriott, I kept a watch out the cab window. Leaving the airport we crossed a little brook and I saw cobbled gravels exposed in the streambed and thought: "well that's a place I can check out anyway". Then continuing along I noticed these same rounded cobbles being used everywhere as decorative borders along the sides of the road and, in places, around the shrubbery. I thought: "the first item of business is to go have a closer look at those cobbles".

Getting in to the hotel after a long day's travel, the impulse is to kick back, watch TV, and try room service. So I didn;t go out and the next day had to make my way to the technical conference I was here to give a talk at. I won't mention the conference, it was altogether tedious: as waste of time, money, and energy. But at one point when I stepped out of the convention center for a smoke, I saw some of those same cobbles bordering the hedge along the driveway, so I stepped over to have a closer look. So the first thing you look for is concave facets and, sure enough, some cobbles had these. The next thing you look for is organized sequences of these facets along an edge. There were there too, and soon I had a couple of examples in hand. One a nice black rhyolite with white inclusions and a waxey texture. It was a small scraper or chopper. Another made of basalt was pointed like some kind of hatchet - although I am still not sure.

The next day, since I didn't have to talk (I did that the first day) I sure wasn't going to back to the conference. I was scheduled for the 11PM "red-eye" home, and since I woke up at 5AM I had a very long day to kill and planned to spend as much time as possible out walking around looking at cobbles in the decorative borders. [In my own defense, I did do a little work in my room]. Trouble was it was raining pretty hard, off and on, and I know the pitalls of letting myself get soaked without proper backup clothing and, anyway, I had to check out of the hotel by 11AM. So I thought about it, could not come up with a coherent plan, and went downstairs to the lobby at 6AM to get some coffee and foodstuffs. Luckily the giftshop was open early and I went in and bought a cheap plastic raincoat and (later after thinking some more about it) a baseball cap. My old gortex raingear is now useless - it has lost its waterproof qualities.

So after showering, packing, checking out, and leaving my bags with the "concierge", I suited up in cheap white plastic shower curtain material, put on the baseball cap and headed out in disguise. I felt well hidden underneath these unfamiliar accoutrements but, when I caught sight of myself later in a reflection, I looked like a little old bag lady.

I more than got my fill of looking at cobbles. Sure enough there are stone tools mixed in there with the rest. I spent about an hour collecting around the Westin Hotel which has quite a lot of cobbled decorative borders. I kept looking to find the definitive example: nicely flaked from the nicest materials. Mostly, however, those guys weren't into elegant flaking. They did not prefer the harder glassier materials [there are all sorts of volcanics: quartzes, basalts, some marble, and many other varieties of rock I woudn't recognize, especially not polished into these lovely flattened oval cobbles]. I found a few more items to bring home but nothing exciting. This item is elegantly simple.
   a    b 
Of more interest is the question of the age of these tools. I walked around trying to come up with a rationale. So when and how were these cobbles formed in the first place? Either on a beach or along a swift flowing river. Probably long ago. But when would they have been accessible for tool making? The old guys could have dug a hole down through the mud to get to them or they could have picked them up at a time when they were exposed on the surface.

I noticed that the topsoil does have some rock in it, including an occasional one of these cobbles. But I have to imagine that the stone tools were scooped up along with the other cobbles, by whatever "Sand and Gravel" company is supplying the local landscapers. What seems most likely to me is that these tools were made when the cobbles were exposed and (at the most conservative) were lying around on the surface of the cobbles, to be covered later by all the alluvial mud of the Bay area. That would be roughly during the last ice age, when sea levels were lower and streams around here ran much faster. Say not less that 17-20K years ago. No big deal. I have no trouble believing that. The items are not projectile, and some may been hafted. They are "semi"-monofacial following a pattern not too different from Arizona's "Desert Culture": where a piece is knocked off the main cobble and flaked a little on one side (see (a) and (b) below). But on these cobble tools a bit of bifacial flaking is present on most pieces; which was not true for the Arizona material.

 a  b 
One thing of great interest was the presence of a few much older pieces - so smoothed out as to have already partially reverted to being rounded cobbles. But still you could tell they once were stone tools, with a few intersecting planes still suggested. Following a by-now-familiar pattern these older tools were fully bifacial, robust and heavy. Choppers or axes - I don't know. I'ld have to estimate these at somewhere in the middle of the previous ice age [i.e. 2 ice ages ago] by the same logic as above. Say 40-60K years old. But so what? There is not much style to these and not much to be learned. No hope of finding human remains or any significant information beyond that they were there. It is sad. Official Science is getting around to the point of view of dates like this for early man in America. [I owe a great deal to George Carter and want to get a bumper sticker that says: "George Carter was right!"]