Ritually Killed Indian gorget Panorama 1220

Here is both and interesting bit of history and an interesting bit of photography. This is a small portion of a slate gorget (on the right hand side you can see a hole that we drilled). This fragment was found along the banks of the Patuxent River in Maryland but the slate is from Central Ohio. Other artifacts indicate that this site had been used for thousands of years as a ritual site by Adena culture indians with numerous items brought in from Ohio (and that was before UPS!). Part of the ritual appeared to be ritually "killing" things of beauty such as this gorget, spears, and what were probably previously buried human bones. Some of the gorgets appeared to have had designs on them and then "erased" ...this is an attempt to provide a detailed photographic record of this gorget so our archy friend Mandy Meldon can look for patterns. It was formed by taking a series of 12 or so stacked shots which were then blanded together in PTGUI...you can see some of the lighting changes which I did not try to modify, but ... in general PTGUI did a great job making the gorget panorama. The original was about 150 megs and monstrously large pixel size (70,000 on one side maybe?). I resampled this down to a tame 10meg to put up on Flickr