March 2026
Hello everybody, my real name, as you might have guessed, is Gary. I was born in Dallas, TX and have lived there most all my life. I worked in the engineering field my whole career, but now I am retired. I started going fishing at a young age and hunting when I was a teenager. I also have hobbies of playing my guitar and restoring my ’85 El Camino. Some of my more recent fishing catches I have posted on the forum, some of you may have seen those when I went trout fishing in the Ozarks.
My journey into artifacts all started when I was just a little 10-year-old kid and I saw my very first frame of points. I wish I could have gone and found some at that time. But it didn’t happen until my brother-in-law took me artifact hunting about 12 years ago. We were up in N. E. Arkansas at my wife’s folks house for Thanksgiving that year. We went out to the field and my brother-in-law’s cousin also came along. We had a fun time and everybody found points that day. I found a Table Rock point made out of Burlington chert, but I didn’t know what kind of point it was or what it was made out of at the time. That started my education into point typology and material identification. I have to give my brother-in-law a lot of credit for showing me the ropes as I knew very little about artifacts when I first started out. Several years later we moved up to N. E. Arkansas and I am able to go artifact hunting quite a bit now. In my area, having the St. Francis river close by makes this area such a good location for artifacts with the significant number of sites that are here. Although I have found Paleo and early Archaic period points, most of my finds are late Archaic to early Woodland period. I have also been able to find a few Mississippian period points as well.
The forum has plenty of friendly people with lots of knowledge of artifacts. I can always get an answer to my question about an artifact. For that, I say thanks and I truly do appreciate the honor of being selected for the Member of the Month.
