Spear points, hammer stones and picks lost to history under layers of leaves, roots and rocks — it was the evidence Scott Ashcraft was looking for.
The ancient tools were inadvertently unearthed in 2021 by a bulldozer fighting a wildfire along a steep slope in western North Carolina. Ashcraft, a career U.S. Forest Service archaeologist, knew these wooded mountainsides held more clues to early human history in the Appalachian Mountains than anyone had imagined.
