ARTIFACTS continued from 16 more than seven hundred—left behind by the Native Americans who had walked the land before it was his. The items he found—among them ax heads, arrowheads, grinding tools, and ornamental stones—he carefully collected, stopping to get down from his tractor to scoop up the relics and carry them safe back to the farmhouse. When my grandfather died in 1981 after a long, peaceful, and happy life, his collection came to my aunt and my mother. They did a very unusual and appropriate thing. They decided not to divide the items between themselves but to donate the entirety to Indiana University, where every item would be protected and catalogued. Recently I had the joy of viewing the John McCullough collection at Indiana University’s Mathers Museum and heard the various objects’ probable dates and uses explicated by scholars: Nathan Johnson, a recent IU graduate; Katie Rudolf, a graduate student in anthropology; and Ed Herrmann, a graduate student of archaeology who has an extensive knowledge of stone tools. Every object was notably well cared for. My grandfather would be so pleased. Katie, Nathan, and Ed showed me among the collection several pre-forms of Folsom points, chiseled out pieces of chert (this particular chert from near Wyandotte Cave) that a Native American would have carried with him with the intention of making it into a finished point later. This blew my mind—these preforms were between 10,000 and 12,000 years old! Once completed, a Folsom point was attached to the end of a throwing stick, which was several feet long with feathers on either side of the far end, rather like a very long arrow. Ed showed me a reproduction throwing stick and also an atlatl, a wooden launching mechanism which could
18 INto ART • July–Sept. 2012
One of many, many bins of McCollough artifacts at the Mather’s Museum.
be attached to the stick to increase its velocity and distance covered. Indians did not have bows and arrows until around the time of Christ. Little is known about the Paleo-Indians who created these ancient objects. It is not even certain if they were of the same ethnic group as the Indians who centuries later came in contact with Europeans. We do know something about the animals they would have encountered: mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, and saber-toothed tigers prowled the land my grandfather would later plow. My grandfather always said: “I was born here, just let me die here,” and so he did, peacefully and in his sleep having lived 87 productive years, a brief span compared to the thousands of years of humanity who had made their way over his corner of Bartholomew County. Yet in those few decades my grandfather succeeded in preserving what could have been lost: precious links to our remote and immense past. The Mathers Museum of World Cultures is on Indiana University’s Bloomington campus at 416 North Indiana Avenue and is open on Tuesday through Friday from 9:30 am to 4:30 pm, and on Saturday and Sunday from 1 pm to 4:30 pm. Many thanks to Dr. Tim Baumann, who made my viewing of the John McCullough collection possible. The collection is not on display to the public, but the museum is definitely worth a trip! Thanks, too, to Indiana State Archaeologist Dr. Richard Jones for his advice and enthusiasm.