Tuesday, April 03, 2012

Squibnocket Stemmed projectile point

For the past several weeks I have been spending hours each week looking for Indian artifacts, without finding anything at all. Mostly, I have been looking for new sites to search. Often this has meant walking for miles along rivers and in other places without finding any places where rocks and exposed dirt are visible at all. Other times I have searched large areas and found them to be totally void of artifacts, sterile. This past weekend I was determined to break out of my recent losing streak. Saturday in the rain I went to a place by a river where I have found stuff before, someone with a truck has come through one small area and the truck tires churned up the earth there. In this little spot, looking very carefully, I found this:
This is what is called a Squibnocket Stemmed point , there is some damage on one edge as you can see. Only a very tiny glint of quartz was visible before I dug this out of the dirt, it was a nice surprise. Quartz is a common material for this type of arrowhead, these are about 3500-4200 years old. Despite the damage this is still a good find for me and I am very happy with it. I also picked up a badly broken midsection of a large point, it is a different material I don't usually find, I think a type of felsite, but really so badly fragmented it is not worth showing. Sunday I went to a new place that I had never visited before. I walked for some hours, most of the area was void but on a little knoll near a stream I found one small area with a lot of quartz debitage from stone tool manufacture, an exciting find. I looked very carefully but didn't find any arrowheads, just chips and flakes. I think this might have been a place where people sat making tools rather than where they actually lived which may have been some other spot very nearby, unfortunately there has been a lot of construction in that place for many decades so the place where they lived perhaps has been destroyed. In this place among all the quartz I found one single tiny flint flake and also these two pieces made of rhyolite, that have been worked.
The piece at left is sort of like a blade, pointed, but unfortunately broken at the base. The edges show the typical alternating flaking for a chipped stone tool.
I think these are what are called preforms. They are roughly worked and shaped, the cortex of the stone has been removed, and these were perhaps ready to be more carefully flaked and refined into knives or dart points or some other kind of tool.

2 comments :

pwax said...

Interesting large items. I cannot make out the material.

Chris Pittman said...

Peter, it is a light-colored speckled material that I believe is a type of rhyolite. I should have taken daylight photos, unfortunately the photos I took with my phone when I found these are poor.