This is the third piece of glass I picked up since last fall because of the signs of deliberate flaking. I have a very hard time believing anyone would make a working edge out of a piece of glass but the signs of deliberate, organized, serration along the edge are unmistakable. (Although hard to photo.)
I find it beautiful in its own way.
I still can't get over how poor you would need to be to not be able to buy a knife.
From what I can see, this was happening a lot in southern MA and RI. It re-enforces the idea, applicable to rock piles, that the ancient dissolves into the modern. Less poetically, Native Americans in southern New England (and probably other places) retained some traditional technologies long after you would expect.
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Fifteen or so years ago, I was shown a chunk of black glass, which had been found at an archaeological site in
Salford, PA. Since it looked like obsidian, I sent it to a lab that authenticates obsidian. After examining the black glass,
I was told that it was not obsidian but black glass. Some years later, I was shown another lump of black glass along with
about two dozen projectile points that had been found in the field just north of the Oley Hills site. During colonial times
there was an iron furnace in the town of Longswamp below, and one of the side products of producing iron was a black glassy slag that
resembled obsidian. I've not found any black glass projectile points, but they probably exist. Your finding points made of
glass made me think of the obsidian-looking black glass that I saw.
It might show no more than that some Indians continued trapping and skinning animals.
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