Wednesday, December 08, 2010

Crude Stone Knife - stemmed like a Stark Point

Found this last weekend. Not much to show for an hour of prospecting but these fields have been picked over a lot and not plowed deeply in some time. Here it is, front and back:
The stemmed base (at the top of the picture) is equivalent to the stemmed base we see on Merrimack points and, in particular, "Stark" points from the early-to-middle archaic of 6K years ago.

Clearly the ancients did not always have good stone tool knapping material available. Here, instead, they used a slate/basaltic cobble from the local glacial till. But you have to really know what you are doing to get a working edge from such low grade material. Here are views of the edges:andNot a museum piece but, probably, most artifacts are like this - crude and disposable.