From arrowheads in the attic to archaeology
Monday, February 04, 2008
You never know where it will be.
You never know when something will strike them.
Extras
You never know what children will run across that forever changes their lives.
Seated at a table in his Forest Hills home, Bob Morris remembered the day it happened to him.
Now 66, he was 10 or so at the time.
He'd traveled to a house on the southern tip of Staten Island on a family mission: to clean out his grandmother's effects.
"I was going through her attic with my mom and aunts, and I found this bag of arrowheads that my uncle, Arthur Decker, had collected when he was Boy Scouts age," Morris said.
"I thought they were really cool."
When the female leadership of the family said Bobby could keep the collection if he wanted?
Well, that was cooler yet.
Soon, he was walking the plowed fields of his native New Jersey in the company of a neighbor collecting his own arrowheads.
Entering Duke University, his interest took a twist.
"I wanted to be a marine biologist and ended up as a geology major," Morris said.
But as a geologists, he ended up studying marine biology anyway — in fossilized remains.
"Paleontology has been a way I could study ancient and modern marine organisms," he said. "That has pretty much been my career."
While working on his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, Morris came to Wittenberg University to teach, and his hobby arrived with him.
"I started seeing all these Indian arrowheads and ax heads," he said. "I began to purchase some pieces. Then I started walking fields around here."
Finding that his finds gave him "kind of a thrill," Moris said, "probably around 1975 or so, I joined the Archaeological Society of Ohio and got to know some of the people over there."
He soon discovered he had something to offer: knowledge about rocks and an inquiring mind.
"I gradually got interested in asking questions" about the kinds of rocks Ohio's prehistoric people used for tools, Morris said.
Since retiring from Wittenberg five years ago, Morris has periodically written about what he's discovered for the Archaeological Society of Ohio's quarterly magazine, The Archaeologist. (See Looking Back on Page B2.)
He also has volunteered at the Clark County Heritage Center, sorting through the artifacts that are there, trying to put them in order.
That has brought Morris full circle.
The shelved collections of the Heritage Center are, in effect, a more highly organized version of the community's attic.
And they hold the very kind of stuff that so fascinated a child who stood in the attic of a house on the southern tip of Staten Island five and a half decades ago.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.
