Reaching beneath a shelf of white sand in the curve of a forgotten creek, Gerry Powers’ hands touched the fringes of time. Sight unseen, sifting through a foot of sediment, his fingertips suddenly danced across the flaked edges of countless stone blades piled like pancakes. A motherlode hidden for 5,000-plus years. Blind luck or outdoor intuition, Powers uncovered one of most astonishing Native American artifact discoveries in history—a cache of 115 quartzite blades ranging from 3” to 7” in length.
“It felt like a dream,” he describes. “I couldn’t pull them all out. I had to go sit on the bank and rest.”
How did Powers discover the stunning trove? Some creek walkers create their own luck.
Cottonmouths and Skeeters
With the heat index percolating beyond 100 degrees on a sweltering August day in east-central Mississippi’s Lauderdale County, a skip from the Bama line, Powers suited up with tennis shoes, blue jeans, and t-shirt for a bout of creek hunting. He grabbed a backpack, probe, and shovel with holes drilled in the scoop, tossed the lot into his truck, and drove to a gas station outside Meridian for a meet-up with a pair of seasoned artifact-hunting buddies, Mike and Bobby. Be there at 1 p.m. or be left to the couch.
Raised on rural backroads, and retired after decades in welding, pipefitting, and crane operation, Powers has made thousands of stone tool finds across his lifetime and carries a highly esteemed reputation in Mississippi archeology circles. However, on this Sunday afternoon in 2011, his crosshairs were zeroed on old bottles, not arrowheads.
“I started out as a bottle hunter in my teens,” describes Powers, 65. “We’d commonly find old lumber camps just walking in the woods. Then I moved onto arrowheads after finding one while hoeing beans, and from there, I hunted farmland. Eventually, as some of the farmland converted to pineland or houses or changed hands, I switched to creeks. Been there ever since.”
Piling into a single vehicle, the hopeful trio rumbled to a virgin creek, new on their list of haunts, and moved 200 yards up the ribbon, poking and prodding with no success. Too much sand and too little time. Change of plans.
They bounced to a second creek, a low-energy stream on private land, likely played out on arrowheads, but a reliable repository of antique pop and medicine bottles. In stifling temps, they walked into a wooly realm of cottonmouths and skeeters. Sticky. Steamy. Humid.
Narrowing to jump-across width in many spots, cluttered with fallen trees, and generally running ankle-high except for occasional deep water along sleepy bends, the creek was bedded by gray clay, topped by intermittent stretches of white sand.
“Mike and Bobby were familiar with this creek and had found some good arrowheads in it, but we were just hoping to score some bottles,” Powers recalls. “We were going along and hadn’t even reached the stretch where we expected to find bottles. Of course, an arrowhead would be nice, but we pretty much believed this creek might be hunted out. Never been so wrong.”
Secrets Under Sand
Moving up the channel, the threesome hit belly-high water in a curve clogged by blowdowns and clutter. They climbed out of the water and into the woods, intent on bypassing the tangled corner. Standing atop the creek, frustration building over the navigational slog and lack of artifact finds, Powers spoke too soon: “I don’t think we need to come back here again.”
Five minutes later, he was pulling blades in one of the most startling Native American finds on record.
Shortcut traversed, Powers slid back into the creek. Standing in several inches of water running over 1’ of sand, he maneuvered into a narrow cubby along the bank with standing room for a single person. Into the sand, Powers inserted a probe—a 4’ rod made from a CB whip, with a makeshift wooden handle, and waited for a telltale ring.
Paydirt. Except, it wasn’t the expected clink of antique bottle glass.
Instead, a clean, distinct chime rode up the probe. Tink. Tink. Not glass.
Powers’ heart jumped. “Whoah. That was no bottle,” he describes. “As soon as I tapped it, all three of us knew it was likely an artifact. That was the sound of Tallahatta quartzite.”
A fine-grained stone, often colored white-gray (almost silver), Tallahatta quartzite is found in bands across several southeast Mississippi counties.
“If you’re probing here for Indian artifacts, you’re basically looking for flakes, the small pieces of rock left behind when Indians made arrowheads. If you’re close to a site where Indians lived, and you stick that probe in the sand, you’ll hit those flakes and it’ll sound like you’re sticking metal through broken glass,” Powers details. “Then you can put your shovel in, and you might get a dozen or more flakes on every pull. That’s when you know you’re in the right spot and you’re fixin’ to find something.”
“And, if you directly hit an actual artifact with the probe, that has a distinctive sound, too, especially quartzite, because the Indians have removed the cortex off the rock, and it gives off a clear sound. In this area, there’s no chert gravel, so if you tap something, you’ll know it’s probably not a false read. With experience, you can probe down in the sand and know what you’re hitting by the sound.”
Expectations building, Powers kneeled and reached into the sand, feeling his way down. Touching bottom, he felt the contours of a rock held firmly in the creek bed, as if the stone had wormed its way into the clay. He waved his hands back and forth through sand and water, creating a pocket of space.
“I got my hand down there to it, and I could feel it was an artifact, but it stayed stuck. I kept wiggling and gently pulled.”
Out of the creek popped a 4”-by-3” Tallahatta quartzite blade beauty, seen by human eyes for the first time in 5,000-plus years. It was a pre-form, an unfinished specimen awaiting final knapping into a knife, spearpoint, or skinning blade. Powers’ pulse surged. The pre-form hinted at industry, stockpiling, or trade. Translated: One pre-form potentially meant more.
Once again, Powers dropped his probe into the sand. Tink. Tink. Thirty seconds later, only 1’ from the first, he pulled a second pre-form. And then another. Five minutes onward, following an artifact chain through the sand, Powers extracted six pre-forms in succession, each 4” to 5” in length.
“By now, Mike and Bobby had come over and were just watching. Remember, there was only room for one of us in this space, and I was still on my knees.”
The trail of pre-forms led 6’ upstream from the original find to a spot behind a fallen 10”-diameter log. Tension building, heart pounding, Powers continued to probe.
“All of a sudden, I hit something that felt different. I didn’t assume anything, and I couldn’t be certain, but figured maybe it’d be a single, very large biface blade. Whatever it was—it was something really, really big.
The creek was about to give up a secret: El Dorado beneath Mississippi sands.
Wishing Well
Supporting his weight with one hand, and reaching with the other, Powers worked his way down through the sand and touched an impossibility. Stacks of pre-forms.
“It was kind of unbelievable. I started moving sand out of the way and I could feel them. Blade edge after edge. My thumb and fingers felt them neatly on top of each other. There was no way to count them. I couldn’t see’em, but there was no doubt about what I was touching.”
Locked in on the surreal moment, trying to assure himself the discovery was no illusion, Powers spoke his thoughts: It feels like there’s a thousand of them down here.
Pulling his hand from the sand, Powers lifted out six pre-forms. And then he did it again. And again. Hand-crafted blades exposed to daylight for the first time in millennia.
Not only had Powers found a phenomenally large cache, but the collection was positioned precisely as it had been buried or lost thousands of years past. “Literally, the blades were stacked in a container shape,” Powers notes. “Whether that was a woven basket or leather pack or something else, they were in place just like the container was still there. The container had rotted away and they’d either sunk into the top of clay or a natural hole, and held tight.”
Dazed by the gravity of the find, Powers lost sense of time as the threesome began lining up pre-form blades on the bank. “Everything blurred. I stopped pulling and asked Bobby for a count: ‘How many have we found? About 20?’”
“Hell no. There’s 42—so far.”
“Well, there’s a bunch more of’em in here.”
Kneeling, pulling, and bending over the log, Powers was spent by the effort. He reversed course and sat on the opposite bank, replaced at the honey hole by Mike. Next pull? Twelve more pre-forms. The honey hole turned into a wishing well.
“We worked in shifts and weren’t even probing anymore; just pulling. It was crazy, crazy, crazy. In the past, I’ve found separated pieces close to each other that I knew were part of a cache, but this was something else. This was so hard to describe, and there were a few minutes where I honestly questioned if my friends were playing a trick on me.”
No trick. The creek walkers packed 89 blades as gingerly as possible into their backpacks and toted out the haul, returning over the next several days for a grand total of 115 blades.
But why was the mass of blades beneath the water and sands of a creek?
Buried, Lost, or Forgotten
High volume cache finds are rare. In June 2025, Ben McGhee beat the odds in a northeast Missouri soybean field and found 51 North blades. In 2008, 165 stone tools making up the Nelson cache were found beneath a tree in Mount Vernon, Ohio. Also in 2008, the Mahaffy cache, containing 83 artifacts, was found by landscapers in Boulder, Colo. In 1982, a farmer plowing a field in Portage County, Ohio uncovered the Lukens cache, composed of 356 teardrop-shaped bifaces.
As for Powers’ cache, who knapped the pre-form blades?
“They’ve been identified as likely being Middle Archaic, at about 8,000 to 5,000 years back,” he explains. “The makers would have been hunter-gatherers and we don’t even know their tribe name or what language they spoke.”
Powers found a single hammer stone with the cache. He suggests the same knapper made most of the cache, but at a different location within Lauderdale County.
“Tallahatta quartzite is sourced locally, and it makes sense that this stone came from bedded quartzite layers within our geography,” Powers says. “I personally know the location of a layer that is 2’ thick and about 50 acres long. The Indians would go to the quartzite quarry sites and break down the rock to pre-forms, saving themselves a serious amount of weight to carry. Those layered bands are exposed generally on high outcrops, but I found the cache on lower flat ground, so that tells me it was transported likely on someone’s back. Whether for trade or further manufacture, no one knows. Maybe both.”
“Most of the big blades in the cache have flakes knocked off in the same spots, so I suspect the same Indian made most of them, and he was good. Really good. As to why they were in the creek, arrowheads are there because they’ve eroded over time into the water from habitation sites. The cache, at some point, was close to that creek flow, and when the creek moved or flooded, the cache was either buried, lost, or forgotten. That’s a question that’ll never be answered.”
The Time Machine
Was Powers destined to be the finder of the historic 115-specimen cache? Despite finding thousands of stone tools, he modestly attributes the cache discovery to blind luck, but acknowledges a seeker must create that luck.
“I don’t have any illusions. I walked into the creek and almost sat on top of the stuff. It’s just that simple. People call me a great arrowhead hunter, but truth is I’m just a guy that goes, looks, and learns. Then again, if you want something magical to happen, it won’t be from your living room. You’ve got to get out there and put the time and effort in to make the opportunity for luck to strike. Maybe it’s a lesson in perseverance.”
Long term, what will happen to the Lauderdale County cache? Powers isn’t settled on the future of the blades—except for one absolute. Unity. No breakup of the 115-blade cache allowed.
“That’s the wonder of it,” he concludes. “Take a blade by itself and it becomes another artifact find. But all together, as a cache bigger than any I’ve ever heard about it my region, that’s where the true magic is.”
Fifteen years after making the historic discovery, how does Powers remember the find?
“I loved every minute and it still seems like a dream. But I’m not special and I didn’t deserve to find it. For me, this has always been about the feelings you get from the adventure, camaraderie, and hunt. It’s the closest you can ever get to crawling in a time machine.”
For more from Chris Bennett (@ChrisBennettMS or cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
Stealing the Farm: China Continues Raid of US Agriculture by Theft and Agroterror
Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told
How the Deep State Tried, and Failed, to Crush an American Farmer
Game of Horns: Iowa Poacher’s Antler Addiction Leads to Historic Bust
Ghost Cattle: $650M Ponzi Rocks Livestock Industry, Money Still Missing
Georgia Watermelon Heist Explodes into Epic Night of Pandemonium
Sisters of Farm Fraud: How 4 Siblings Fleeced USDA for $10M
When Conservation Backfires: Landowner Defeats Feds in Mindboggling Private Property Case
Cold-Busted: Frozen Deer Decoy Nabs Poachers and Cocaine in Spectacular Sting
Sticky Fingers: USDA Fraudster Steals $200M in Stunning Scam
