Monday, July 26, 2010

Points

Arrowheads or projectile points, as archaeologist call them, are truly wonderful finds.

The projectile point is diagnostic as to culture and time frame in prehistory. For example: Clovis culture (circa 12,500-12,900 calendar years before the present) made (knapped) points a certain way that did not carry into another time frame.

Four of us were in our usual survey mode about 5 meters apart, walking the transects of our survey area.

Bob called out, “Point! And another!”

I, too, called out, “Point. In fact I have several!”

Michelle and Valerie dropped their backpacks and came to our spot.

We had five projectile points!

We did the usual plotting of each artifact and then the bagging, tagging and mapping.

This all took a bit of time during which we also oh’d and ah’d over each point.

Finally, we were ready to restart the survey.

Michelle and Valerie went to their spots, picked up their back packs and called out,

“We have points under the packs!” They had two more!

We think we have had a super day when someone finds one point, but seven?

Surely, it was a bad day for some poor archaic hunter who had lost all these well knapped points.

But, what a wonderful morning for us about 6,000 years later!

1 comment:

  1. I remember that day well. How lucky we were that an artifact collector had not come along and taken all the points!

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