Cutting Through Time

Original ax head with dirt removed

Back in late July, a friend on Facebook saw my original post about the ax head (found metal detecting) and saw blade (found walking behind my coonhound Seth) that I'd discovered in the forests of Painted Post, and she let her son know about the post.

​Her son, we’ll call him Roger (because, well, that’s his name), caught up with me in the parking lot of a local supermarket. (Life in a small town.) 

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Ax head after soaking in white vinegar bath for two days.

 






​Cutting to the Chase
​Turns out, Roger has a degree in archaeology, and is rather skilled at both collecting and discovering historical artifacts and even a rare fossil or two.

​After a 30-minute, question-and-answer session (I think my milk I’d just bought in the supermarket went bad while we spoke), he said the ax head and blade were probably from the mid-19th century. He added—always the scientist—that he would want to do further testing in a lab. The main clues to his initial conclusion were how deep it was buried, our area’s long history with logging and the period of the logging industry's peak, and the mention of the ax’s narrow eye, i.e. the slit in the ax’s head where the wooden handle slides into the metal.  

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View of the ax's eye. The narrowness suggests it's of older manufacture.

​Note: Roger seemed to remember that there was a textbook he’d had in school that could approximate the age of the ax head by measuring the ax head’s length and the eye's width, but he couldn’t recall the book's title from so long ago.  I'll some more research to see if I can find it.

Ax with naval jelly applied to remove stubborn corrosion. Note: only kept on for a few minutes per direction on jar.

All this information from Roger did follow what my NY State (retired) Forest Ranger dad had said as well—the narrow eye indicated it was not a modern ax head.  Turns out, the shape of the ax has a special name—the Michigan ax head—that did become popular in the mid-1800s till this very day. (For more information, see https://clutchaxes.com/michigan-axe-pattern-uses-and-origin/).
       As I slowly stripped away the corrosion (see the pics), I was hoping to find the name via the manufacturer's stamp, which seemed a pretty popular thing with most manufacturers, my research indicated. Unfortunately, there either was never a name stamped into this ax’s head, or the corrosion was so bad that the name is now forever lost.

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Final ax head after much of the corrosion was removed. You can begin to see the shiny metal through the pitting show.

30" saw blade found in the forest of Painted Post due to a process called cytoturbation.

​Like a Blade Out of . . . Nowhere
 I explained to Roger that the saw blade was found was near a creek, about ¼ mile away from where I’d found the ax head. I told him I'd walked over that spot a fair number of times, but I never saw it before. Yes, there had been a hard rain just prior to me finding it, but would that be enough?
He then explained a process of the ground freezing and thawing—called cryoturbation—which caused the soil to “churn” and can being artifacts below to the surface.


Interestingly, Roger said I would probably find glass there, and I told him that I did find green glass there! It's always nice to talk to an expert.
    
Ah yes--life walking behind a coonhound.

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