[ErnBatavia]

I love old stuff....but growing up in Kalifornia, the oldest man-made object I’ve ever touched would probably be a couple of the coastal Mission buildings.

[SunkenCiv]

:’)

[Verginius Rufus]

You're probably right about California. Even with the Spanish missions, not everything dates back to the period when the missions were active--some were destroyed by earthquakes or fell into decay after secularization and had to be rebuilt, but in most cases there are probably parts of the original structures around. I once visited Mission San Antonio and found a painted potsherd on the ground, presumably decorated by one of the Indians during mission days.

Santa Clara University has Old Mission Santa Clara on its campus but I think it is a smaller replica built later. It has the grave of Peter Hardeman Burnett, the first American governor of California (who was a convert to Catholicism).

[Chainmail]

You haven’t looked very hard. I found a lot of Indian artifacts, including spear points, flint shaping tools and arrowheads in the California desert and Sierra Nevada mountains. A lot of petroglyphs dating back thousands of years on the 29 Palms Marine base. I even found a brass sword hilt in a cave near where LAX is today when I was 11 or so.

[afraidfortherepublic]

My grandmother’s ranch in Chowchilla had quite a collection of Indian mortors that my uncle and my grandfather had turned up when plowing. My cousin still has some of those. They had arrowheads too.