Getting a Handle
A WHILE BACK, a Parke County farmer walking through his field near the Wabash River kicked at a rock, noticed its unusual appearance, and reached down to pick up what turned out to be an ax from the late Archaic to early Woodland period, some 5,000 years ago. He sold the artifact to a collector in Ohio, who recently passed it on to me. Until I was given the ax, the oldest hand-crafted object in our house was a blanket chest from the 1780s, on which I pile my dirty clothes until my wife tells me they belong in the hamper.
European settlers arrived in Western Indiana in the first decade of the
