I kept looking and moved into an area where I had looked the week before. I tried to ignore my own footprints and the rocks I had already flipped over. Fron time to time I would spot a chip or flake barely peeking out of the dirt, any broken edge protruding from the soil has to be checked. Then I found this, fully exposed on the ground:
This is something special and I was thrilled to find it. I looked at it for a long while before I picked it up, savoring it. Here it is in my hand, for scale:
The most remarkable thing about this find, to me, was this: less than two feet away from this obvious and exposed point, was the footprint of an arrowhead hunter who missed it. And that hunter was me. I must have practically stepped right over this thing. I would like to believe that this point was exposed by the recent rain, but I don't know that it rained hard enough to completely expose this if it was buried before. Perhaps it was covered by a leaf on my previous visit. But it could also be that as I walked by this point I was distracted just for a moment, maybe I was picking up some other rocks nearby, or looked up at a bird for two steps in just the wrong moment. Sometimes I will revisit a place where I have looked and find tiny fragments I missed barely visible and mostly buried in the dirt, that is normal as you can never spot absolutely everything. But this one was super obvious and I seem to have walked right by it. I scoured the entire area, looked everywhere I could, I didn't find anything else.
This point appears to have grinding on the stem. I took another look at the felsite stemmed point I found last week and that definitely was ground. This quartz one was probably resharpened down from something bigger. I think these might be Merrimack points, 6,000 years old.
Nice and symmetric, a beautiful point! I have nothing like that and it seems more like a "small stemmed" point than a member of the Merrimack family. But it is pretty big too. Congratulations.
ReplyDeleteI suggested Merrimack based on the well-thinned and ground stem, the neatly executed shoulders, and the size. These can be difficult or impossible to type with certainty, I have read that narrow stemmed points may have been a technological manifestation rather than a cultural manifestation, they seem to have been widely used at many times all over the eastern US and variations may not be as significant with these as with other types, for whatever reason. The terms "small stemmed," Lamoka and Wading River seem to be used more or less interchangeably in Massachusetts to describe points with this shape.
ReplyDeleteI have heard this opinion of stemmed points not being cultural but based on practical uses of the point. I don't buy it on an emotional level but there is also an rational reason to reject it: the stemmed points coincide with certain limited types of material. Those materials are not found with other types of arrowheads. So it is cultural.
ReplyDeleteOf course I should be honest and admit I don't know those later arrowhead types. For some reason they are not common here in Concord.
ReplyDeleteA comment about the "Merrimack" classification. I came across several of them at the Robbins Museum and Chris is correct: these stemmed points are called "Merrimack" points. But I have to object to the use of that particular word. I collected at the heart of the Merrimack River system in Concord and, no, those arrowheads do not occur there at the sites I know. So whatever those little beauties are, they are not really from that river drainage - and I deny that they are like Nevilles or Starks.
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