The Frank and Katye Spicer Collection:

For the last 200 to 300 years, the independent yeoman farmer has served an interesting role in American archaeology. Time and again they've found themselves on the front line of local archaeology, inadvertently churning up ancient relics and detecting important prehistoric sites while plying their daily craft. Two such American farmers were Katye Nichols-Spicer and her husband Frank of Centerview, Missouri. It was said that Frank, a lifetime member of the Sedalia West Central Missouri Archaeological Society, could spot a good stone lithic from his tractor seat. Katye became his partner in amateur archaeology and together they established a fine family collection of prehistoric stone artifacts. But Frank and Katye weren't the only amateur archaeologists on the farm. Frank's mother Ida, who was born in 1890, is credited with having found the largest of the axe heads in their collection while walking the fields of the family farm near the Blackwater bottoms in Johnson County. Families like these and family farms like theirs have provided many of the best clues about each state's first human inhabitants.

Together, the Nichols and Spicer collections promise to deliver on what we suspect will be the most important record of prehistory Missouri lithics and projectile points ever to be offered at auction.