More about the cemetery historical marker

I might as well say it here as well as anywhere else that the reason there are these two arrowhead shapes on the stone is because there were two different people who came and left their arrowheads in this spot. Some made their stemmed arrowheads out of materials from east of Concord: back in Cambridge and Saugus and Marblehead and points north along the Atlantic coast. While the others made eared points of materials from the west: Westford, NY and points inland. It appears that the eared points are the descendents of ancestral fluted points of the Clovis and other paleo Indians. I took an early date for a stemmed point (6,000 BC) and a later date for the eared point (3,000 BC) in order to point out the contrast between the paleo Indian story of great game hunters using fluted points and coming over the land versus the story of the stemmed point people who came from the sea. I think Ted Timrek would call them the "Red Paint People" and they were in Concord along with, and over the same time frame, as the descendents of Clovis.

What is interesting and what is, I think, one of the only stories that comes down to us from this pre-history is that these two different peoples - from the sea or from inland - both lived in Concord over many thousands of years where the two different arrowhead styles persisted. The stemmed points got smaller over time and the fluted points became "eared" and then "tanged" and then "notched" but still these basic shapes remained and remained different. In other words these two cultures just did not intermingle. There was no cultural merging over a period of at least 3K years. So that is the story, the two peoples did not get along.

Those are the shapes of the arrowheads from Concord, MA. I guess I could illustrate this, let me go see what I've got. [See following post]