Hello to all,

I hope you are as excited about this first edition of the Newsletter as I am.

The AACA is growing daily, and with that growth comes the increased opportunity for the Association to further the fight against fraud. The less than honest can thumb their noses at a few, but they lose when they do it at thousands. The stand you have taken by joining the AACA becomes more meaningful with each additional member.

The rapid growth we've experienced is because the need is so great. Just ask the many of your friends who have been cheated by an artifaker. It is my hope the day will come when a dealer who is not a member, or at least one going by the Association's standards, will have no credibility with buyers. Your membership brings that day closer.

Of course, the rapid increase in membership has caused an increase in the Associations costs. We have launched Fundraiser FY2003 to cover those costs, as well as to provide improved and increased service to the membership. If you have not already donated, please visit the Website at www.theaaca.com to see how you can contribute. Note membership in the AACA remains free.

Some of you may have followed the recent public forum discussions concerning the AACA. Most of the comments result from a misconception of what the AACA really is. It is time to correct those misconceptions.

The AACA is not a "club". It never was, is not now, and never will be. A club is a group of people banding together for a shared activity. Some examples: A Bridge Club, a Radio Controlled Model Airplane Club, or a Country Club. Club members usually select their leaders.

The AACA is not a "society". A society is a group of people banding together for some shared intellectual pursuit. Examples: a debating society, a poetry reading society, or an archaeological society. Members may, or may not, select their leaders depending on the by-laws.

Although the AACA has some components of a club, or society, it is an "association". An "association" is a governing, or standard setting body for some activity. Some examples are: the National Realtors Association, the American Medical Association, and the National Hotrod Association. In our case, of course, the activity is the ethical collecting of authentic artifacts. The AACA has, and will continue to set the standards required to promote integrity in this activity. Member, or voting rights are limited in associations because membership is based on acceptance of the associations principles. Some associations have limited voting rights for members. An example is the NRA. The voting rights are restricted to "lifetime" members, and those voting rights do not involve policy.

Why do people join Associations? Because they benefit from the association with the principles, and the standards of the Association. As a member of the AACA you have made it known you are person of integrity in the artifact community, and have added your person to the overall strength of those standards. Your association also affords you the protection of the entire body when dealing with violations of those standards.

It should also be noted that a Board of Directors of any organization is the sole policy setting body of that organization. That is just what a Board of Directors does. Of course we do not set policy in a vacuum. A policy statement from the AACA Board of Directors is always prompted by concern from some member, be it private email, or general public discussion.

The strength of the AACA is derived from the membership. There is no association without you. With the combined strength of all we will continue the fight against artifact fraud, and continue the promotion of integrity in our cherished hobby.

Cliff Clements

President

President@theaaca.com
Authentic Artifact Collectors Association

Open your calendars and set aside the first weekend in November for a truly FANTASTIC artifact collectors weekend!

The AACA has put together a three day artifact extravaganza that is sure to be fun and very educational!

This weekend event will be held at the beautiful Drawbridge Inn in Ft. Mitchel, Kentucky where we have reserved over 13,000 SF of meeting space, seminar rooms and over 100 dealer tables!

Artifact dealers, seminars, educational displays, evening parties, live music, raffles - this is an event you don't want to miss!

Watch the AACA website ( http://www.theaaca.com ) for additional information on how to reserve tables, hotel rooms and how to enter drawings for free hotel rooms and table space!

If you would like to be on a notification email list for additional information as soon as it comes out, please email the show director Jim Bennett at woodman32@earthlink.net

We look forward to meeting you in Kentucky in November!

AACA Board of Directors

When he drifted into the streams and breaks of the Canadian river, the old cowboy was trailing cattle to water, looking for new calves and enjoying his free cowboy ways. It didn’t take him long to recognize a perfect location for a line camp on the pretty little creek, but he couldn’t have known he was about to become immortalized by accident. His name was Allen Bates, better known as “Allie” and he was about to lend his name to the creek, the colorful flint cropping
out of the ridges, and an entire civilization. Alibates.

What “Allie” Bates had stumbled upon, in the late 1800’s, was the cradle of an advanced culture, one that flourished with a hundred cities, complete with apartment complexes, at a time when their European contemporaries were living in grass huts and caves, and being subjugated by Rome. This civilization stretched for two hundred miles, with cities along the Canadian river that housed an estimated 20,000 people. The Alibates People developed trade, business, and government, in nomadic tribal times. This would become one of three permanent civilizations dominating the North American continent: the Mound People of Illinois, the Pueblos of the Southwest....and the Alibates civilization in the Texas panhandle.

This civilization began about the time of William the Conqueror (1066.) They found that the bison followed the Canadian River Valley, and provided a ready food source for any people who took up residence there, so they constructed permanent dwellings. They must have found it very easy to trade bison meat to nomads, as trade they did, and in a very big way. Perishable trade goods limited trade, but the beautiful colored flint found along the Canadian could be traded and transported very long distances for a wider variety of goods. Variously called the Panhandle Pueblo Culture, the Antelope Creek People, and the Alibates, by any name, the civilization flourished in an estimated time period of 900 - 1500 A.D, thereby enduring far longer than the United States to date.
In absorbing this background, you are prepared for the thesis of this article: Why Alibates is too important to be left to modern government bureaucracy and stilted academics to husband. The nature of Alibates artifacts is subjective; and transcends science and government. It is enigmatic; it is art.

Alibates flint was quarried from the ledges of the Permian-age dolomite above the Canadian River; geologically, the Quartermaster Formation of this dolomite, replaced by silica to form a very distinctive, multicolored chert: the unique Alibates flint. It’s basic colors are dubonnet (maroon to red) and grays (blue to black.) Mix in whites and tans, banded shades of pink, blue, purple and brown and you have most of nature’s palette. Primitive man realized that the exposed chert was more difficult to knap, and began to quarry the flint from the top of the formation into the center. They have left some 500-600 quarry pits in the Canadian drainage as evidence of the great industry that was born there long ago.

In 1926, an Alibates point was discovered buried in the bone of a giant bison, near Folsom, New Mexico. In 1933, another was found at a kill site near Clovis, New Mexico, and yet another near Miami, Texas. The Paleo-Indians clearly had fashioned projectiles from Alibates. And yet, it was left to the Alibates Culture to realize the full potential of the lint, which apparently was as an enormous trade resource. This is documented by the discovery of Alibates artifacts in Montana, the Great Lakes region, Ohio, throughout the Great Plains, and throughout Texas. Further, the excavations of the Alibates cities on the Canadian produced Catlinite from Minnesota, shells from the Gulf of Mexico, obsidian and turquoise from New Mexico, painted pottery from Arizona, shells from the Pacific, and obsidian from Wyoming. This was the center of an unprecedented, enormous trade network built around a unique resource: the beautiful, multicolored Alibates flint.

The reader will note that Alibates is not a particularly fine, workable material. We must deduce the prized quality to be color, indeed a rainbow of color, found nowhere else banded and blended in the astonishing combinations found in Alibates. Moreover, the major artifacts discovered clearly display a preconception by the maker of geometric banding and veining, and a selection process of individual material to enhance value. These early men had created objects of art for broad appeal. They were making beautiful tools, knives, and projectiles that would be treasured.

Enter modern Americans of the 20th Century. The archaeologists, the point men of science, amateur and professional, began to excavate. They found the stone art of the ancients, and their building structures, and they measured and probed in metric precision until they had taken the measure of the civilization. The quarry pits, silted over by the Dust Bowl and years of neglect, became depressions and difficult to see. Next, the engineers and politicians went to work on the Canadian River, and the cultural sites along its banks. They built a dam, turned the valley into the “Lake Meredith National Recreation Area” and as an afterthought, created a small fenced federal enclave of one of the main Alibates quarry ridges above the river, relegating its management and administration to the National Park Service. Unspoken are the “cloak room deals” that gave the surrounding lands to the
politically-privileged of the 60’s. Naturally, the next federal stratagem was to cut paved roads, parking lots and docks into the valley to “manage” the Monument and Reserve properly, with the attendant administrative and equipment buildings and sheds. Today, the Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument (read Federal Enclave) can be viewed by the American people by “guided tours only, from Memorial Day to Labor Day,” and is administered by the uniquely-unsuited National Park Service headquarters in downtown Fritch, Texas - 8 miles distant.

This writer determined to visit the politically-vandalized site in the off season of 2001. An advance reservation was required, for supervision by a ranger during the observation. I was met at the barbed wire gate of the dreary compound by a teen age “rangerette” on loan from a college in Georgia, and was regaled by this nitwit on a superficial, scripted rambling worthy of any Disney spiel. Primarily, I was warned not to pick up any rocks or disturb any flora.
Up the terraced and graveled footpath to the ridge we went, and upon arriving at the top, found ourselves surrounded by Alibates cores and debitage. The quarry pits are now depressions, choked with dirt and weeds. Looking down at the river valley, now a “Recreation Area,” I viewed the boggy marsh that covers dozens of rich cultural sites with a brooding disdain. The prehistoric art of the Alibates People has been rescued and protected from We The People, and is now appreciated by absolutely no one. This is the lesson to be taught: governments cannot be sanctioned by the governed to husband heritage. Only by appreciation of the people, and consequent assigning of value, can treasures like the Alibates artifacts be protected. If you are among the fortunate few who are able to find or buy worked Alibates, examine it, measure it and weigh it....and then stand back and ponder on the artistic inspiration that flaked it carefully for just that result, admiration.

   Being no neophyte to artifact collecting, I've always had my preferred methods of finding points. My first rule is to wait for summer. Up here in the high country that means late July (maybe early August), or as soon as the wind dies down to a steady 30 mph so your eyes don't water the ground enough to promote vegetal growth.

   Round about March, though, I start reading all the Pack posts about hitting recently drenched plowed fields, with beautiful points sticking out of fresh furrows, and helpful landowners begging a guy to get all those sharp rocks out of their fields. So last year I decided to try that and approached a few farmers in the area. I found one on the north side of the valley but he couldn't raise much besides a quarter acre of potatoes and agreed his dog didn't like me any better than I liked him. Can't recall the farmer's exact words but it might have been "Sic 'em".

   I had to find a better strategy. I saw this post about finding rocks in a creek. "Hail, Ken, you cain't see 'em. Gotta get down and feel through the muck. You'll know a point when you feel it". Sounded like reasonable advice at the time, although I'm still looking for the gentleman who offered it. I think it was April when I tried out that idea. It'd had been a fairly mild winter and we were up to 18 degrees, not counting the wind. I found a creek that had a small channel of ice free running water and figured I'd try out that idea of muck scrabbling.

   First trick was making it to the open water. I had waders on, although my online mentor suggested I just sit in the water and wallow like a hog. Being a cautious type, though, I edged my way out to the liquid section of the creek and looked for a place to wallow. Right about then the ice made my decision for me and I was up to my neck. My waders filled up with what felt like liquid nitrogen and my first rational thought was to float downstream until I found some muck. Then I could scrabble for all the points I knew were there. About a half mile later a big chunk of ice pushed me towards the shore and I finally found some wallowing ground. I dug and groped through a ton of slime but the ice flows kept bashing me in the head every time I got close to a point. After what seemed like a few minutes but was probably 2 hours, I scrambled up the bank and crawled back to the truck with enough ice in my waders to make a thousand margaritas. I made it home in one piece. Solid, rigid, one immovable piece. I'd still like to recall who suggested that muck wallowing trick... Like to invite him up to Montana in the spring to give me more tips.