Limaces, the Garden Slugs of the Artifact World

Figure One - 3.5-inch long surface recovered limace Yuma County, Colorado.
John Branney Collection. 

To get you in the mood for the world of Paleoindians, I am taking you on a brief trip back to 10,600 B.C. from the fourth book in my prehistoric adventure series titled CROW and the CAVE. In that particular scene, a young Folsom hunter called Cansha was attempting to keep a short-faced bear trapped in its winter den for a specific reason revealed in the book.  If the short-faced bear escaped, Cansha and his compadres would be in a world of hurt and would probably be on the menu for the beast's dinner! 

See you on the other side of the blue. Boy, I sure hope Cansha survives!      

“WHACK!”

A massive paw exploded out of the blackness of the cave. The paw’s curved claw ripped the tip of Cansha’s nose wide open. His eyes saw red as painful agony knocked him backwards. He fell to the ground onto a pile of broken bones and frozen beast feces. Cansha grabbed his severed nose with both hands and tried to stop the bleeding. The sensation from the pain was horrendous. Tears flooded his eyes. His hands filled with blood as he laid there in the muck. His nose stung with the fury of a rattlesnake bite.  Blood escaped through his fingers. The maneater shoved its front leg through the gap, its claws outstretched, searching for flesh. The boulder wobbled back and forth as the huge beast pressed its weight against it. Cansha writhed as he fought to escape the pain. He saw nothing through the blood and the tears. He stood up and staggered on unsteady legs. Cansha feared the beast would escape. A roar erupted from the cave. The boulder rocked further. The maneater’s leg squeezed out through the widening gap...

What?!?! What happened to Cansha?!?! Well, you don't expect me to give away the plot, do you? I am leaving you hanging with Cansha's life in the balance. You will have to read CROW and the CAVE to find out if the young lad survives, and if he did, how he did it.  

Now, it is time to get to the main topic of the article. I think you are going to like it...    

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Now that you experienced a very brief taste of what it was like in Paleoindian times, I now want to bring you up to speed on garden slugs. "Garden slugs?" you might ask, "I do not want to read an article on gardening!" Whoa! Don't leave yet! In France, the common 

Figure Two - an ordinary garden slug, 

or in France, a limace.  

garden slug is known as a limace. Most of us have experienced the bad fortune of spotting a limace or two on our lawns or gardens or crawling across the sidewalk (figure two). I have to admit that they are pretty nasty-looking creatures.   

So, what does that squirmy, ugly thing have in common with Paleoindians or archaeology? French archaeologists took the French word for a common garden slug, limace, and applied it to unifacial, humpbacked prehistoric stone tools that resembled the garden nuisance. Voila! Just like a sticky garden slug, the name limace stuck. 

Don't worry if you don't recognize the artifact type called limace. Most people don't. I didn't know about them until someone mentioned them to me and I then did some research. In my research on limaces, I noticed that people called them by other names like hump-backed scrapers, humpies, flakeshavers, awls, perforators, unifacial drills, slug-like scrapers, narrow side scrapers, unifacial flaked drills, groovers, slugs, bars, boats, Hendrix scrapers, bipointed bars, and I am probably missing a few. Whew! Since French archaeologists were the first ones to name that artifact type, I will call them limaces for this article. But if you see these other names in the literature, they are probably referring to limaces. 

Figure Three - Cross-sectional view of the limace from figure one. Note the plano-convex
or unifacial profile and retouch along the edges. John Bradford Branney Collection.

A limace is a type of blade that was flaked by a prehistoric knapper along both edges, forming what appears to be a slug-looking artifact (figures one and three). I am using Francois Bordes (1961) definition of a blade which he defined as a detached piece or flake of stone that is twice as long as it is wide. Limaces are plano-convex or unifacial in cross-section. A plano-convex artifact has a flat, mostly unworked underbelly (ventral side) and a humped back (dorsal side). Unifacial means a piece of knapped stone with flake scars on one face only. Limaces range in form from oblong to teardrop-shaped. 

Most investigators believe that prehistoric people utilized limaces as stone chisels for shaving and gouging hard materials such as bone, wood, ivory, and antler. A typical limace might have started out bi-pointed as in figure one but after hard use as a chisel, its working end most likely ended up beat up and blunted. Some limaces ended up with steeply angled faces due to unifacial resharpening much the same way as the "bit" or working end of a plano-convex end scraper. 

Based on their analyses, Grimes and Grimes (1986:40) stated that there was a high probability that prehistoric toolmakers hafted most limaces into the rigid socketed handles of bone or wood. That makes sense from a leverage perspective. The investigators cited evidence for hafting as edge rounding; deliberate abrasions, or grinding of basal edges; consistent lengths, widths, and thicknesses in their investigated sample; ‘trim to fit’ dimensions on the proximal ends; and lateral inflection points on some specimens. The investigators also believe that there were instances when they thought limaces were handheld.  

Figure Four - Two limaces that I  surface found
in northern Colorado on the same site. Dorsal and
ventral views. The longest limace is 3.3 inches long.  
John Bradford Branney Collection.   

Michael Sampson (2004) studied limaces found in the Tulare Lake Basin between Bakersfield and Fresno, California. In his paper, he proposed that true limaces, or “humpies” as he called them, were diagnostic artifacts of Paleoindians at least in the Tulare Lake Basin. He noted that investigators found humpie-like artifacts in both Siberia and Japan dating back to pre-Clovis times. Sampson also noted at least five other well-documented Paleoindian sites where investigators found limaces or humpies; the Shoop Site in eastern Pennsylvania, the Debert Site in Nova Scotia, the Bull Brook Site in Massachusetts, the Vail Site in Maine, and the Lehner Mammoth Kill Site in southern Arizona. Grimes and Grimes (1985) reported that investigators found small, elongated unifacially flaked tools resembling flakeshavers (what they called limaces) at several fluted point sites including Bull Brook, Debert, Plenge, Lindenmeier, Whipple, Shawnee-Minisink, and Krmpotich. Gramly (2000:37) reported that although limaces were a rare form, they were present in most large-sized Folsom, Clovis, and other fluted point Paleoindian assemblages. 

Figure Five - Four suspected unifacial limaces surface 
recovered in northern Colorado.  
John Bradford Branney Collection. 

 

Just like the shell-less garden slug, limaces don't get much respect. There does not seem to be much interest in limaces based on the lack of articles and research done on them. In my world, true limaces are a rare find and the destructive nature of their usage may be responsible for some of that rarity. It is difficult to find a limace in excellent condition like the ones in the figures. Those examples are still in good enough condition to be recognized as possible limaces. The difficulties lie with identifying limaces with damage and telling the difference between a limace and a scraper or blade tool. Not all limaces look the same or have the same dimensions or possess distinguishable or diagnostic characteristics like a Clovis or Folsom point. One person's limace can be another person's scraper or blade and vice versa.

There are assumptions we have to make about an artifact's past usage when we identify an artifact as a limace. When studying an artifact for the possibility of being a limace, I ask myself whether there is enough physical damage or wear on the proximal end of the artifact to determine its use as a chisel. I am sure that I have picked up many beat up, broken, or used up limaces that I did not recognize for what they were. I also have reasonable confidence that prehistoric people repurposed many broken and used-up limaces into other stone tools. Refurbishing worn-out, blunt-ended limace chisels into plano-convex end scrapers seem like it would be a worthwhile effort back in prehistoric times.   

SHADOWS on the TRAIL 
The first book in the series. 

References Cited. 

Bordes, Francois. 1961. Typologie du Paleolithique ancient et moyen. Delmas. Bordeaux. 

Gramly, R. M. 2000. Guide to the Palaeo-American Artifacts in North America. Persimmon Press. Buffalo. 

Grimes, J.R. and B.G. Grimes. 1986. Flakeshavers: Morphometric, Functional, and Life-Cycle Analyses of a Paleoindian Unifacial Tool Class in Archaeology of Eastern North America, Vol. 13 (Fall 1985).         

Sampson, Michael. 2004. Humpies, an Unusual Flaked-Stone Tool Type from the Tulare Lake Basin. Tulare Lake Archaeological Research Group. San Diego.  

About the Author.

The historical fiction novels written by John Bradford Branney are known for their impeccable research and biting realism. In his latest blockbuster novel Beyond the Campfire, Branney catapults his readers back into Prehistoric America where they reunite with some familiar faces from Branney’s best-selling prehistoric adventure series the SHADOWS on the TRAIL Pentalogy.

John Bradford Branney holds a geology degree from the University of Wyoming and an MBA from the University of Colorado. John lives in the Colorado mountains with his wife, Theresa. Beyond the Campfire is the eleventh published book by Branney.