Folsom to Agate Basin in SHADOWS on the TRAIL

Figure One - Two Colorado projectile points or knives surface found on private land. On the left
is a Montrose County Folsom dart and on the right is a Morgan County 2.7 inch long
Agate Basin knife form. John Bradford Branney Collection.   

In an earlier article on the SHADOWS on the TRAIL Pentalogy blog site, I explained why I used separate Native American languages to differentiate between the three tribes in my first book in my Paleoindian adventure series, SHADOWS on the TRAIL. I also differentiated between two of the tribes with their use of different projectile point types for hunting and weapons.

In SHADOWS on the TRAIL, I used Folsom projectile points for the Folsom people and Agate Basin projectile points for the Mountain people. Figure one is a photograph of a Folsom projectile point from Montrose County, Colorado and an Agate Basin dart or spear point from Morgan County, Colorado. Both points are in my collection and as the photograph reveals, the technology and morphology of Agate Basin and Folsom points were quite different.

Below, is a passage from my book SHADOWS on the TRAIL. In this particular scene, Avonaco and two hunters from the River People were searching for evidence of who attacked their village and massacred their people. The hunters found a spear with a unique projectile point at the tip of it. Avonaco described his past experience with this type of projectile point.

Waquini then handed Avonaco an object and said, “Avonaco, we found this in the brush near the village.”

Avonaco held the spear in his hands. The spear shaft was the same wood that the River People used, but the stone spear point was different. The stone spear point was thinner and longer than any Avonaco had ever seen and made from a shiny, black rock material. Avonaco ran his thumb down the sharp edge of the spear point and quickly pulled his thumb away.

“Éŝkos!–Sharp!” Avonaco exclaimed, looking down at his bleeding thumb. 

He continued to examine the spear point, “I have only seen a spear point like this once made from this black rock. When I was a boy, I found a spear point much like this deep in the mountains. My father told me the black rock comes from the mountains.” 

Avonaco then inspected the sinew wrap that connected the stone spear point to the wooden spear shaft. The River People used sinew from deer or bison to attach their spear points. 

The Agate Basin point at the tip of that spear gave Avonaco a clue as to the tribal origin of its owner.    

Figure Two - CLICK to JOIN the ADVENTURE

In east central Wyoming, there is a famous archaeological site named Hell Gap. At the Hell Gap site, the investigators discovered an extensive geological section of rock representing thousands of years of human occupation. According to Irwin-Williams (1973), radiocarbon dates from the Hell Gap site indicate that the people who used Agate Basin points existed sometime between 10,500 to 10,000 uncorrected radiocarbon years ago. The Folsom people existed between 10,900 to 10,200 uncorrected radiocarbon years ago based on the radiocarbon dates from the Folsom sections at Hell Gap and the Agate Basin site in northeastern Wyoming. Geological evidence and radiocarbon dates indicate that there might have been some temporal (time) overlap between the latter years of the people making Folsom points and the early years of the people making Agate Basin points. Perhaps, it was the same people...

Even though there was spatial overlap and might have been temporal overlap between Folsom and Agate Basin People, Bradley (Frison 1991; Kornfeld, Frison, and Larson 2010) stated that he did not believe that Agate Basin technology came from Folsom technology. While a Folsom point is wide, thin and fluted, an Agate Basin point is thick and lenticular in cross section. If Agate Basin technology came from Folsom technology, there had to be a dramatic shift that has yet to be understood or explained.

Figure Three - Paleoindian projectile point evolution from left to right; Clovis, Goshen-Plainview, Folsom, Agate Basin,

Hell Gap, and Scottsbluff. Note the radical change from indented bases to lanceolate-shaped points at the Folsom / Agate Basin transition. For scale, Scottsbluff point to the right is 3.95 inches long. John Bradford Branney Collection. 

Since the technology used to make Agate Basin points was different than the technology used to make fluted Folsom points, do you think two separate cultures made them? They appeared to utilize the same bison resources but at different times.

Stanford (1999: 312) postulated that Agate Basin technology might have come from an earlier Northern Great Basin projectile point that was typologically similar to Agate Basin but predates Agate Basin on the High Plains by over one thousand years. He proposed that it was possible that Agate Basin technology came from the Paleo Arctic/Denali Complex people in eastern Beringia southward to the Great Basin and then across to the northern plains people a thousand or so years later.  

Figure three is a photograph of Paleoindian projectile point types beginning with Clovis and ending with Scottsbluff. My objective of figure 2 is to show the technological change, the paradigm shift that occurred between Folsom and Agate Basin. The only similarities between Folsom and Agate Basin projectile point are that they are both made of rock, both used to hunt game, and both have sharp tips.  

Archaeological evidence indicates that the people who made Folsom and the people who made Agate Basin utilized a similar economy, centered around bison procurement. But, to really understand the differences between these two Paleoindian cultures, we need the "soft evidence", i.e. languages and other perishable cultural practices and artifacts, and these are not going to be found in any archaeological record. 

Were the people who made Folsom and Agate Basin points the same people? What caused them to change projectile point technology? Will we ever find out what the relationship was between the people who made Folsom and the people who made Agate Basin? 

Frison, George C.

1991        Prehistoric Hunters of the High Plains. Second Edition. Academic Press. 

Irwin-Williams, Cynthia, Henry T. Irwin, George Agogino, and C. Vance Haynes

1973    Hell Gap: Paleo-Indian occupation on the High Plains. Plains Anthropologist. 18      (59 ):   40-53.   

Kornfeld, Marcel, George C. Frison, and Mary Lou Larson

2010    Prehistoric Hunters-Gatherers of the High Plains and Rockies. Third Edition. Left    Coast Press. Walnut Creek, California.  

Stanford, D. J.

1999    Paleoindian Archeology and Late Pleistocene Environments in the Plains and Southwestern United States. In Ice Age Peoples of North America, edited by R. Bonnichsen. Oregon State University Press. Corvallis, Oregon.