The Museum

Welcome to the Cloud Nine Indian Museum

Our museum began in 1992 when our basement was converted into a display of our artifacts and collections. It has since grown and expanded to include more rooms and more stuff. Most of it's contents have been found by the authors, but some pieces have been graciously donated.

Our collection was found predominantly in Northampton County, PA and ranges from Paleo to European contact artifacts, ca.1740's. Our father started collecting in 1955 and would fieldwalk deep plowed fields adjacent to a water sources. His efforts were rewarded. Over the years his collection amassed and today we are able to display arrowheads, knives and scrapers, hammerstones, drills, celts, axes, pestles and morters, bola stones, pottery, beads, colonial relics, and a few other "field finds." You could be surprised what you could find by "just looking down." 

 Julian and I saw a gradual shift from deep, rich plows, to the current common practice of no-till farming. When we were little, we would stumble over a deep plow scar in the mud after a soaking rain. The Earth smelled good on those mornings and days. If we were lucky, we would spot a large spear sticking out of a hump of soil. If we did, we would call each other over and test the dirt where the buried 1/2 of the spear was. Using a stick, poke the dirt of the buried spear. If the point moved, it might be whole. It moved! Wow...a quartzite spearpoint. We are the first people to touch this tool since the man who dropped it...I'll never forget those days.

It was hard for Julian and I to see the land that we had these intimate experiences with developed rapidly in the 1990's. Honestly, it's one of the most sensitive things in my life. It's hard to have a connection with something...like natural soils, trees and streams, only to have them replaced with asphalt, houses, cars and people..and sometimes gates! We understand that death is a part of life, and we feel blessed that we were able to recover and preserve this piece of local history. One winter, we all sat down and mapped each site into a home-made site catalogue. It's rough (with plans to update it sometime), but I'm glad we did that.

Our collection is not only sentimental, it is a nice representation of local pre-history.  Our area was rich with spring-fed streams which drain into the Bushkill Creek, and then into the Delaware River in Easton, PA. These were seasonal hunting grounds for bands that would follow the water into our lands and retrieve valuable meat and furs for their families. We find their flaking areas, camp sites and lost items (strays) in plowed fields after a rain. Some of these seasonal encampments must have been used for many years, maybe even generations, since so many stone artifacts have been recovered. We believe we can identify items like scrapers, arrowheads and knives that were made by the same individual.

We had only about 4, or 5 sites that we believe were larger camp sites. There we found things like mortars, pestles, larger cutting tools, pottery, a gouge, axes and beads. One one of those sites we found contact period artifacts believed to be trade items that were traded to an existing native american camp in the area. Most of these sites have been developed, since land that was once lived on is still the most desireable today.

The curator is a very artistic person. Among his many creative ideas, is a way to display the artifacts in an attractive manner. Below are a few examples of frames that he has put together. I'll probably write a whole blog post about the display of the artifacts, so Coming Soon: Artifact Display. Question: Do you have to have beautiful artifacts to make attractive displays?


Aside from the attractive display of arrowheads, a nice way to more effectively present a tool is on a shaft, or spear, like it would have been before those rotted away. We have nice examples of shafted scrapers, spears, arrows, a bow drill and a pump drill to show how the stone implements were fastened and used. If it's nice out we like to demonstrate flint knapping or atl~atl throwing. We like to think that our museum's displays and demostrations effectively represent the prehistoric lifeways of the people who walked this same land in Eastern PA, that we walk and drive on today.

  

We hope that readers of this blog will enjoy our stories, collections and ideas.