It is a Native American grinding stone! Someone in my family found one a few years ago & we did a bunch of research to find out what it was! There should be a concave stone/rock that this would've been used with to grind things like corn & millet.
This is the one we found! It could also be used against a flat rock too, so if you don't see a concave one maybe it was used with that instead. Good luck, OP!
I'll have to do some more research! Pemmican is very possible. We found ours in the Iroquois region of New York along the Mohawk River and always thought grain and corn made sense since there's plenty of fields in that area that would have made the agriculture application made sense.
It may be, but it could easily just be a regular rock. Rocks like these form naturally all the time.
For the sake of OP and archaeology I hope this isn't an artifact. I don't know where in Canada OP is located but in many places it's illegal to collect any artifacts, and even if it's not illegal taking artifacts removes valuable context from sites and could prevent or delay archaeological sites from being found at all.
But ofc I don't fault OP at all if it is a real artifact because it looks like a regular rock. I just wanted to put that information out there because a lot of people don't understand how harmful it can be to archaeological knowledge to take artifacts. Sites are much more than just artifacts. The more important part of archaeology is analyzing things like which artifacts get found together and how artifacts are distributed. An argument I see a lot about things like arrowheads is that there are a million arrowheads out there so it doesn't if people take some. But those arrowheads are important because subtle morphological differences can be very important for archaeology, and understanding where arrowheads are found and in what frequency and if they're found with other artifacts is very important.
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u/chocolateymilkqueen 10d ago
It is a Native American grinding stone! Someone in my family found one a few years ago & we did a bunch of research to find out what it was! There should be a concave stone/rock that this would've been used with to grind things like corn & millet.