The High Sierra

We knew just enough to realize this was a Native American knapping site. We had recently learned that there is no endemic obsidian in the high Siera, so that whenever you find it up there, you are seeing something that humans brought and left behind. So this was a place where Native Americans, Paleo-Indians as they are sometimes called, or the first people, had sat around, smacking blocks of obsidian maybe the size of bread loaves, using stone tools to knock off shards that they then knapped further, until they had arrowheads, spearheads, hand tools with cutting edges, and so on. There were so many shards under our feet that it had to have gone on like that for — who knows? Hundreds of years, it looked like. This place had been a human place for hundreds of years, you could see that just looking around.