Spanish Diggings Orthoquartzite

Figure One - Colby-variety Clovis point on the left and Hell Gap point on the right, both 
surface-recovered approximately thirty miles west-northwest of Spanish Diggings. I 
believe the raw material for both points is Spanish Diggings orthoquartzite. 
John Bradford Branney Collection.      

The Spanish Diggings prehistoric rock quarries lie on the northwest flank of the Hartville Uplift in eastern Wyoming. The Hartville Uplift is an elongated, north-northeast trending structural arch that is twenty-five miles wide and forty miles long and ranges in elevation from 4,700 to 6,100 feet above sea level (figure two). The Hartville Uplift was created during the Laramide Orogeny in the late Cretaceous around fifty to seventy million years ago. The Laramide Orogeny was a geological event of grand importance and involved intense mountain building and structural basin creation in western North America from Canada through the United States and into east-central Mexico.  

Figure Two - Google map of eastern Wyoming looking to the northwest. The Hartville Uplift 
is marked and the location of Spanish Diggings is circled in orange. PRB and DB in black 
are Powder River Basin and Denver Basin, respectively. Photo courtesy of geowyo.com.   

For archaeologists and artifact collectors, the Hartville Uplift is known for its quality cherts and orthoquartzites coming from the Paleozoic and Mesozoic Era rocks. Prehistoric miners at Spanish Diggings found the prized orthoquartzite in outcrops of the Morrison-Cloverly formations of the Mesozoic Era. Mottled gray quartzites and chert were found in the Morrison formation while colorful and exceptionally fine-grained orthoquartzites were found in the Cloverly formation. The orthoquartzites in the Cloverly came in various shades of gray, yellow, brown, lavender, purple, and red. Not all of the sandstone in the Cloverly formation was silicified enough to produce high-quality orthoquartzites which makes the rock quarries at Spanish Diggings even more exceptional. Outcrops of Morrison-Cloverly cover an area of approximately 1.5 square miles in the vicinity of Spanish Diggings. Those outcrops are bordered by Miocene and Oligocene rocks.  

The Spanish Diggings were some of the largest prehistoric rock quarries in the world. For over thirteen millennia, prehistoric people came to Spanish Diggings and mined orthoquartzite and chert from the hills and valleys. When the prehistoric people left the rock quarries, they carried the raw material with them and spread their finished artifacts and chipping debris across the countryside for hundreds of miles in every direction.

Figure Three – Looking west and slightly south at the hills and valleys of Spanish Diggings.
In the distance is beautiful Laramie Peak. Photograph by Neil A. Waring.

Reher (1991:272) reported a mapping project that calculated the size of Spanish Diggings at approximately 30,000 square meters using the three primary quarry complexes: Barbour, Dorsey, and Spanish Creek. Another 18,000 square meters and approximately 170 stone circles could be included if the campsite and workshop areas near the Barbour quarries were counted. If eleven other clusters of quarries with less debitage were added to the three primary quarries, an additional 120,000 square meters and 500 stone circles could be counted in the Spanish Diggings complex. Reher added that investigators were still discovering additional mining activity and quarry sites at Spanish Diggings. 

Author’s Story Part One: My first memory of Spanish Diggings came from the mid-1960s. I was attending grade school in eastern Wyoming, and if memory serves me, I was in the fourth or fifth grade. The school scheduled an assembly when Jerry and Mae Urbanek were to show us prehistoric artifacts that they found at a place called Spanish Diggings. That was the first time I ever heard of Spanish Diggings, and I was pretty excited about the exhibition. When the school scheduled assemblies I was usually excited for a couple of reasons; assemblies got me out of the dreaded classroom and most assemblies were somewhat entertaining. Secondly, that specific lecture intrigued me because the artifact bug bit me early in life. I had already gone artifact hunting with my family several times and my mother inherited her father’s artifact collection of spearpoints, arrowheads, and scrapers. I was completely fascinated with that collection, and I was hooked on artifacts and prehistory at a very early age.   

My family lived in the right place at the right time for artifact collecting. There was not much to do in rural Wyoming in the 1960s and 1970s except hunt and fish and shoot and explore the outdoors. We were fortunate enough to live in a wide open country with large ranches and mostly friendly ranchers. After I found out about the assembly, I rushed home and told my parents. My mother reminded me that Mae Urbanek was a semi-famous Wyoming historian and author who wrote several books on Wyoming history and its early settlers. That fact only added to my enthusiasm.     

Figure Four - Clovis platter cache found southeast of Spanish Diggings. The material
appears to be Spanish Diggings orthoquartzite. John Bradford Branney Collection.    

Cowboys first discovered the prehistoric rock quarries and mining pits at Spanish Diggings sometime before 1870. At that time, the locals believed that Spanish conquistadors dug the mines in their pursuit of precious metals. A rancher-cowboy by the name of Joseph Stein was often credited with coming up with the name Spanish Diggings sometime around 1882. In 1893, a Cheyenne man named Sidney Bartlett brought more attention to what he called the “Mexican mine” by writing an article about the quarries for the San Francisco Examiner. Stein and another rancher named Lauk were so convinced that there was gold at Spanish Diggings that they hired part-time workers to prospect for gold there from 1886 to 1891. The two ranchers and their workers never reported finding any gold or other precious metals at Spanish Diggings.   

The news about Spanish Diggings eventually caught the attention of academic institutions and museums. In 1894, renowned geologist Wilbur Knight from the University of Wyoming visited the site and documented nineteen mining operations on the north slope of a mesa. He reported vertical shafts, horizontal tunnels, trenches, circular pits, mine debris, and large, crude stone tools. The narrative soon changed from the Spaniards digging for gold to prehistoric Americans digging for toolstone.     

Author’s Story Part Two: The day of the Urbanek show-and-tell did not arrive soon enough for me, but it ended as a huge letdown for this young tyke. At that age, I was not an artifact expert by a long shot, but it seemed to me that Mr. and Mrs. Urbanek showed us a bunch of plain ole rocks that they dubbed prehistoric artifacts. I didn’t know what false advertising was at the time, but that was what I thought of their collection. I expected much more, like my grandfather’s collection with glorious spear points, knives, stone axes, and other cool artifacts. I wonder if I revisited Urbanek’s artifact collection today if I wouldn’t have a different opinion. I imagine their artifacts looked very similar to the artifacts that George Dorsey and associates found in 1891 (figure seven). I learned one thing from the Urbaneks' lecture; I wanted to see Spanish Diggings for myself! That night, I lobbied my parents to take us to Spanish Diggings in the spring. 

Figure Five - George Dorsey
at Spanish Diggings. 

One of the early scholars to visit Spanish Diggings was George A. Dorsey, the curator of the Field Columbian Museum in Chicago. In 1891, ranchers Stein and Lauk picked Dorsey up at the railroad station in Guernsey, Wyoming, and headed out to Spanish Diggings. In 1900, Dorsey published a short paper on his visit to the prehistoric rock quarries. The following paragraph was Dorsey’s observation after studying one of the many outcrops of orthoquartzite in the Cloverly formation.    

“Examining one of the walls of the wash we find a solid stratum, thirty or more feet thick, of flint, or rather of sandstone, which has been worked by silicious waters, thus forming quartzite. This stratum is of variegated color, passing from yellowish brown to violet gray, varied with shades of pink, violet, yellow, purple, etc., the whole stratum thus producing a most beautiful and remarkable color effect.”

-George A. Dorsey (1900:238-239)

Figure Six - Sketch map of Spanish Diggings area by R. F. Gilder (Holmes 1919).      

Dorsey was not alone in visiting Spanish Diggings. There were many organized expeditions by scholars and visitors in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Most of the expeditions were focused on filling barrels and wagons with artifacts and raw materials to take back to their colleges and museums. There was little research done on the rock quarries themselves or the prehistoric people who created them. Some of the early artifact finds reported were digging tools made from antler, stone, and bone; rock wedges; and grooved mauls. For several decades, countless crusades of scholars, recreationists, flintknappers, and artifact collectors carted off thousands of tons of artifacts and raw material from Spanish Diggings, creating a huge archaeological data gap and forever altering the quarries’ prehistoric record. That data gap did not stop George A. Dorsey from prognosticating how the prehistoric miners exploited the raw material at Spanish Diggings.  

“The upper two or three feet of rock is very brittle and does not chip well; indeed, it occurs not as a solid mass, but, owing to long weathering, in long thin sheets or irregular blocks.

“After the soil had been penetrated, the workmen encountered the upper unworkable rock through which it was necessary to excavate to a considerable depth before the denser masses of workable material and the jasper and chalcedony nodules were encountered. On account of the broken character of the upper mass of the quartzite bed such excavations were not necessarily difficult operations. Furthermore, it is possible to believe that this work could be carried on with tools similar to those which would be found efficacious in working the exposed stratum down in the valley.”

-George A. Dorsey (1900:240)

Figure Seven - Typical quarry finds from 
Dorsey's expedition to Spanish Diggings.  

Quartzite was the most abundant tool stone that prehistoric Americans mined at the Spanish Diggings rock quarries. There are two types of quartzite. The first type is metaquartzite which started out as a sedimentary rock called sandstone. In metaquartzite, the original sand grains and silica cement were recrystallized through heat, pressure, and chemical action by a geological process called metamorphism. Metaquartzite is very hard because it is primarily quartz. Metaquartzite tends to have deformed interlocking quartz grains (Andrefsky 2005).

Spanish Diggings is famous for a second type of quartzite called orthoquartzite or silicified sandstone. Orthoquartzite is a clastic sedimentary rock called sandstone which was made almost entirely of quartz sand grains. In orthoquartzite, the quartz sand grains were not deformed like metaquartzite but instead were bound together with silica cement through a geological process called silicification. The prehistoric miners at Spanish Diggings discovered that the high-quality, fine-grained orthoquartzites were near perfect for making tools and projectile points.  

 

Figure Eight - A knife form with a broken tip that I found on one of my earlier visits to Spanish Diggings. The prehistoric individual used orthoquartzite from one of the quarries.    

Author’s Story Part Three: If you ask a Wyoming native when spring will arrive, he or she might inform you that spring arrives in June. If you inquire when summer begins, that same Wyoming native might tell you summers begin sometime in early July and end in August. If you question what the rest of the year is called, that same Wyoming native will inevitably answer, “Winter in Wyoming!” 

Spring finally arrived in Wyoming and my family was ready for their pilgrimage to Spanish Diggings. My parents knew a rancher from our church who owned a big chunk of Spanish Diggings. The rancher gave us permission to hunt rocks on his property and even mentioned that we might find some “petrified turtle shells” if we were lucky. He even drew us a little map of how to get there so that we did not get lost. Even today, Spanish Diggings is not an easy place to find.

My father drove us to Spanish Diggings in our Chevy station wagon. I remember the roads became progressively worse the closer we came to Spanish Diggings on the map until we were traveling on what was best described as a glorified cow trail. My father stopped smack dab in the middle of a wide ravine filled with sagebrush and rattlesnakes. The ground next to the car was littered with chunks of orthoquartzite and chert cobbles from the mine pits. There was so much refuse on the ground that it made hunting for artifacts nearly impossible. It was literally like looking for a needle in a haystack. We spent the day hiking up and down the hills. We found a few primitive tools and worked pieces but nothing special. Our little adventure was probably not worth the wear and tear on our car. The best finds of the day were five or six fossilized turtle shells. I remember finding those as if it was yesterday. I often wonder what happened to those fossils. I regret not taking better care of them.  

Figure Nine - 
SHADOWS on the TRAIL Pentalogy 

I worked on a large ranch and farm a few miles northwest of Spanish Diggings every summer in high school and through a summer or two of college. I occasionally visited Spanish Diggings on my dirt bike in the evenings after work. I found nothing but broken cobbles and crude hammerstones. In all my visits to Spanish Diggings, I only found one small projectile point made from chalcedony. From what I read in the literature, my lackluster result in finding finished artifacts was not much different than that of the early scholars and visitors. When explorer William Henry Holmes visited Spanish Diggings in the early twentieth century, here was how he characterized the trip.

“Nothing whatever was found in the finished state, and even partially worked specimens were not numerous. The refuse about the pits is characterized by the large size of the partially shaped rejects.”

-W. H. Holmes (1919:213) 

Prehistoric Americans came to the quarries, selected good pieces of raw material, roughed them out, and took them elsewhere to finish them up as stone tools and projectile points. Looking back at the grade school assembly, the Urbanek collection might not have been so bad after all. Rough slabs and barely worked cobbles of quartzite and chert were probably typical, even back in the early cowboy days. Perhaps that was the reason why the early cowboys thought Spaniards dug the mines and not prehistoric Americans; the mine debris on the ground was not indicative of who created it!

These days I find a lot of artifacts made from orthoquartzite. I suspect the raw material came from Spanish Diggings but that might not be the right conclusion. Like other popular high plains raw materials like Knife River or Flattop, Spanish Diggings orthoquartzite has its own imposters and lookalikes coming from other areas. I even discovered a prehistoric rock quarry in northeastern Colorado where the orthoquartzite looks remarkably similar to a few flavors of Spanish Diggings orthoquartzite.   

Well, that’s my story. I hope you enjoyed it. No matter what happens to Spanish Diggings or me in the future, I will always cherish those early memories of Spanish Diggings!            

References Cited

Andrefsky, William Jr. 2005. Lithics – Macroscopic Approaches to Analysis. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.  

Dorsey, George Amos. 1900. An Aboriginal Quartzite Quarry in Eastern Wyoming. Field Columbian Museum, Publication 51, Anthropological Series, Volume II, Number 4. Chicago. 

Holmes, W. H. 1919. Handbook of Aboriginal American Antiquities. Part I – Introduction to Lithic Industries. Smithsonian Institute. Bureau of American Ethnology. Bulletin 60. Washington D.C.   

Reher, Charles A. 1991. Large Scale Lithic Quarries and Regional Transport Systems on the High Plains of Eastern Wyoming – Spanish Diggings Revisited in Raw Material Economies Among Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers edited by Anta Montet-White and Steven Holen. University of Kansas Publications, 19.   

     

About the Author

John Bradford Branney grew up in Wyoming and from an early age developed a passion for everything prehistoric. He has amassed and documented a huge collection of prehistoric artifacts and fossils. After high school, Branney earned a B.S. degree in geology from the University of Wyoming. Branney then chose a career in the oil and gas industry where he worked for thirty-plus years. During that career, he earned an MBA in finance from the University of Colorado. Branney has written numerous magazine and journal articles about prehistoric artifacts and high plains archaeology. He is currently writing his twelfth book and the sixth book in his prehistoric adventure series the SHADOWS on the TRAIL Hexalogy.    

Jimmy Allen or Frederick Point? Too Close for Comfort

 

Jimmy Allen or Frederick? Too Close for Comfort

by John Bradford Branney

Figure 1 -  High Plains Jimmy Allen and/or Frederick projectile points. Which is which?

The longest point is 3.25 inches long. John Bradford Branney Collection.   

After the projectile points of the Cody Complex came and went in the archaeological record, an abrupt change took place in projectile point technology on the High Plains. The stemmed projectile points with transverse pressure flaking of the Cody Complex disappeared from the archaeological record and a series of lanceolate-shaped projectile points with parallel-oblique flaking appeared. Instead of stemmed Alberta, Scottsbluff, and Eden points from the Cody Complex, the new projectile point style was indented with concave bases and parallel oblique flaking on many. Why the change from stems to indented bases? It might have been that indented bases worked better with the hafting method at the time, or it might be as simple as human preferences shifted. The indented base probably fit as "snug as a bug in a rug" in the hafting elements of the spear or dart weaponry. Paleoindians used what worked. After all, this was not the first time that indented base technology showed up in archaeological records with Clovis, Goshen, Folsom, and Midland as examples. 

Within this Late Paleoindian timeframe, archaeologists have identified and named a plethora of different indented base projectile point types on the High Plains such as Jimmy Allen, Frederick, Andersen, Angostura, Lusk, and others. 

Figure 4 - 1.7 inch long surface found Jimmy Allen point from eastern Colorado. I already hear some of you screaming 

Dalton! Dalton! Dalton! 

John Bradford Branney Collection. 

The variations in Late Paleoindian indented projectile point types added even more confusion to projectile point typology. If anyone tries to convince you that they have Late Paleoindian projectile point typology down pat, they are either a point-type genius (which is a blessed few) or they are pulling your leg. We find similarities in the different projectile point types such as Jimmy Allen, Frederick, Andersen, Angostura, and Lusk, and we find differences (some so subtle they hardly deserve mention). Were the differences seen by different points driven by other factors such as workmanship, quality, style, knapping skill, and/or raw material?    

Figure Four - A surface found knife form from Wyoming.
It is 2.6 inches long with indented base, polished lower
edges and base, and parallel oblique flaking.
Jeb Taylor identified this as a Frederick point.
John Bradford Branney Collection. 

Archaeologist and flintknapping expert Bruce Bradley (Larson et al 2009:271) explained Late Paleoindian projectile point typology this way; After the Cody Complex, there was a technological horizon on the High Plains incorporating the same basic flintknapping technology, but with slightly different styles of projectile points and knife forms. He included the following projectile point types in his analysis; Jimmy Allen, Frederick, Lusk, Brown's Valley, and Angostura. He noted that each type used the same flintknapping process from bifacial percussion reduction through pressure thinning through a final product of projectile points and knife forms. He also noted that oftentimes these different projectile point types exhibited similarity with their parallel oblique flaking.  

The two projectile points in figures three and four are both Late Paleoindian from the High Plains. Other collectors who have seen them have called them Jimmy Allen or Frederick, or even a mid-continent projectile point type called Dalton. What do I call them? Wait and see.         

Figure 5 - University of 
Wyoming anthropologist
William Mulloy. 

In the late 1940s, an adept amateur archaeologist by the name of Jimmy Allen discovered a Paleoindian bison kill site in the Laramie Basin of Wyoming. In 1959, University of Wyoming anthropologist William Mulloy (Figure 5) and associates excavated what he later named the James Allen site. Investigators recovered thirty fragmentary projectile points, all of which had similar characteristics. The projectile points were unnotched and lanceolate-shaped with indented (concave) bases and rounded corners. Dr. Mulloy named the new projectile point Jimmy Allen after the discoverer of the site.   

In Jeb Taylor's Projectile Points of the High Plains (2006), the author described Jimmy Allen points as lanceolate-shaped with carefully executed diagonal flaking and a pronounced basal concavity. In Greg Perino's Selected Preforms, Points, and Knives of the North American Indians (1985), he described Jimmy Allen points by their side and basal edge grinding, diagonal flaking, basal thinning, and rounded basal corners. Both authors appear to be singing from the same sheet of music when it comes to the description of Jimmy Allen points.    

One important point that I want to make before proceeding is that NOT all Jimmy Allen points have diagonal or parallel oblique flaking and NOT all diagonal or parallel oblique flaked projectile points are Jimmy Allen points! 

Figure 6 - Cynthia Irwin-
Williams. 

Cynthia Irwin–Williams (Figure 6) and her brother Henry Irwin discovered what they thought was a new projectile point type at the Harvard University excavations of the Hell Gap site in east-central Wyoming in the 1960s. They named the new point type, Frederick, after the site's landowner. Investigators unearthed twenty-four examples of the so-called Frederick points. Both Cynthia Irwin-Williams (1973) and Henry Irwin recognized the similarities between their newly named Frederick points and Mulloy's Jimmy Allen points. According to Henry Irwin, he believed that Frederick points had a greater degree of basal concavity and a different width to length ratio than Jimmy Allen points (Byrnes 2009:218). Therefore, the label Frederick stuck for the points found at the Hell Gap site.      

In his book, Jeb Taylor described Frederick points with the same diagonal flaking as Jimmy Allen points but stated that Frederick points were thicker with straighter bases. Taylor's 'straighter base' comment appears to contradict Henry Irwin's comment in the previous paragraph. Irwin stated that Frederick points had a greater degree of basal concavity while Taylor wrote Frederick points had straighter bases than Jimmy Allen points. It cannot be both ways. 

Based on Jeb Taylor's study of the original projectile points from both the James Allen and Hell Gap sites, he believed that there were enough differences between Jimmy Allen and Frederick to warrant two separate projectile point types. Taylor also mentioned in his book that he had a personal conversation with George Frison who told him that before Cynthia Irwin-Williams died, she admitted to Frison that Frederick was most likely the same point type as Jimmy Allen. 

I have not studied 'in hand' the original points from the James Allen and Hell Gap sites, but I have handled enough parallel oblique flaked, indented base Late Paleoindian points to believe that Jimmy Allen and Frederick points are the same point type.  

It appears that Jimmy Allen at the James Allen site and Frederick at Hell Gap overlapped in time, providing a little more evidence for their possible relationship. Irwin-Williams et al (1973) determined that the duration of Frederick at Hell Gap lasted from approximately 8,400 to 8,000 years BP while recent dating techniques at the James Allen bison kill site placed the event sometime around 8,405 years BP (Knudson and Kornfeld 2007).  

To summarize, it is my opinion that Jimmy Allen and Frederick points are the same point type, and as my father used to put it, "That's close enough for government work!"  

REFERENCES CITED  

Byrnes, Allison

2009    Frederick Component at Locality I in  Hell Gap: A Stratified Paleoindian Campsite at the Edge of the Rockies by Mary Lou Larson, Marcel Kornfeld, and George C. Frison.  University of Utah. 

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.     

Knudson, Ruth Ann, and Marcel Kornfeld  
2007    A New Date for the James Allen Site, Laramie Basin, Wyoming. Current Research in the Pleistocene 24:112-114.  

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

2009    Hell Gap: A Stratified Paleoindian Campsite at the Edge of the Rockies. University of Utah.        

Perino, Gregory
1985    Selected Preforms, Points, and Knives of the North American Indians, Volume I.  Points and Barbs Press, Idabel, Okla.  

Taylor, Jeb
2006   Projectile points of the High Plains. Sheridan Books, Chelsea, MI.     

Check out my prehistoric book series the SHADOWS 

ON THE TRAIL Pentalogy at the 'link' below. 

CLICK for JOHN BRADFORD BRANNEY BOOKS

      

Who Dun It? Paleoindian Projectile Point Typology Part II

Figure One - What do you call these High Plains surface finds?  The three critical attributes I used to identify them were; 1). Pronounced basal concavity, 2). Carefully executed diagonal flaking, and 3). Edge grinding. The longest point is 3.2 inches. 

John Bradford Branney Collection.  

Identifying Paleoindian projectile points from the High Plains by type is often more art than science. Deciding what kind of projectile point is in your hands can lead to some hand wringing, especially for those projectile points that lie somewhere ‘between’ two known projectile point types. I call these borderline points, 'tweeners'. One of the more confusing arrays of projectile points is the Paleoindian/Early Archaic points with indented bases. For decades, people sorted most indented base projectile points from the High Plains into two buckets; Clovis if it had flutes and Yuma or Plainview if it had basal thinning and no flutes. No doubt that the differences between the various indented base projectile points made by 

My latest book. Click for Information

Paleoindians were subtle enough to get away with that for a while but as more sites were discovered, archaeologists named more projectile point types. Today an indented-based Paleoindian projectile point can fall into a number of buckets depending on its specific attributes. These buckets include Clovis, Goshen, Folsom, Plainview, Jimmy Allen, Midland, and I am sure I am missing a few. And that's just for the High Plains! Figure one shows one group of indented base points from Wyoming and Colorado that I believe are a single type. Do you agree with these points being a single type, and if so, what type do you think they are? I call them Jimmy Allen points. 

The similarities between projectile point types can sometimes be striking and the differences subtle. I have seen two identical projectile points made with the same technology and of similar age called different point types just because they were found in different parts of the United States (figure two). I bet you have, too. This is precisely why I do not get too hung up on projectile point-type names. In my opinion, collectors and archaeologists go way overboard trying to cubbyhole projectile points into specific types. I think there are too many projectile point types now! Coming up with a new projectile point and naming it becomes a status thing, a feather in someone's Easter bonnet. Instead of focusing on the similarities with existing projectile point types, even from another region, the focus is on the differences. An example of this situation is the Jimmy Allen points above in figure one. There is a lot of variation between these points but I lump them into a single projectile point type: Jimmy Allen. If someone found these in the midwest, they might be calling them something else entirely.  

Figure Two - The Texas Panhandle point on the left is 

called Plainview while the northern Colorado point 

on the right is called Goshen. 

Can you see any morphological differences? 

I can't. The longest point is 2.4 inches.

John Branney Collection.  

Editorial: I am straying off topic a bit so let me reel myself in and stay away from the politics of proposing a new projectile point type. Well, maybe I will reel it in after this paragraph. Let me finish my thoughts on the topic. It is almost impossible for an amateur archaeologist or collector to have a new projectile point named and recognized. Professionals have a forum for naming and documenting new projectile point types and there is a lot of politics involved. It can go the other way as well, such as denying the existence of a projectile point type in a certain region. Texas archaeologists have denied the existence of Agate Basin points in Texas for some time as if a manmade border suddenly stopped Agate Basin people from crossing the Texas border twelve thousand years ago. I have personally found and seen Agate Basin points in Texas, but since professional archaeologists have not found them in situ, they deny their existence in the Lone Star State. In most cases, collectors and archaeologists in Texas call them Angostura even though morphologically they are Agate Basin. Politics! Whew, now, that I have my bellyaching out of the way, back to the topic at hand.     

Imagine that you or I discover a new prehistoric site while surface hunting. We find several examples of a different style of projectile point that we have not seen before. Since these are surface finds, there is no archaeological or geological context so we do not know the age of the prehistoric culture they came from. We can take an educated guess on the time period based on the flintknapping style and technology used. The projectile points kind of look like an existing projectile point type, but they are not a complete match. Our projectile points have a couple of features that make them different. We wonder if we found a new projectile point type or just came across a creative prehistoric flintknapper from a known prehistoric culture. What do we do? What would you do? I know a couple collectors who have found new projectile point variants on the surface sites where they hunt and these collectors christen these variants with a localized name. Professional archaeologists might not recognize that local projectile point type, but local collectors do.    

Selecting and recognizing the critical attributes in projectile points can be difficult and subjective. At one extreme, we focus on the general attributes and fit our group of projectile points into an existing projectile point type. At the other extreme, we focus on the minute differences from an existing projectile point type, without regard for variation along a common theme.

Figure Three - What would you call these surface-found projectile points? I call them Midland points

based on three attributes; 1). Thin, 2). Indented to flat bases, and 3). Fine, abrupt, non-invasive

pressure retouch forming regular and straight margins. The longest point is 2.5 inches.
You might call them something entirely different.
John Bradford Branney Collection   

If the description for an existing projectile point type is too tight and rigid, we end up with a plethora of new projectile point types that might reflect the differences in quality, craftsmanship, and/or workmanship, but not the actual prehistoric culture that made them. If the description for an existing projectile point type is too loose and flexible, we might accept large variations which may actually be a change in technology and/or prehistoric culture.

The bottom line is (yes, I do have a bottom line); A PROJECTILE POINT TYPE IS ONLY A NAME. Don't get too hung up on it! The key element in projectile point identification is doing the homework required to identify your Paleoindian projectile point to the best of your ability! But just because you or I or Joe Blow thinks a point is a specific projectile point type doesn't make it necessarily so.   

                 Wanna another Paleoindian Who Dun it? 

Read the second edition of SHADOWS on the TRAIL! 

Figure Four - CLICK for INFO on SHADOWS on the TRAIL

In case you missed "Part I of Who Dun It", CLICK LINK

Who Dun It? Paleoindian Projectile Point Typology - Part I

Figure One - Three thousand years plus of High Plains projectile point evolution. From left to right:

Clovis, Goshen, Folsom, Agate Basin, Hell Gap, and Scottsbluff (3.95 inches long). 

Evolution went from fluted and indented bases to stemmed bases. John Bradford Branney Collection.   

Welcome to Part One of my Who Dun It? articles. In this article, I will approach the topic of Paleoindian projectile point typology from a philosophical slant versus a technical slant.  I hope you enjoy the article.  

Amateur and professional archaeologists spend a lot of time studying and categorizing High Plains Paleoindian projectile points by technology and morphology. These projectile point types are then tied back to the presence of specific Paleoindian cultures or complexes, such as Clovis or Folsom or Agate Basin or Cody, etc. But was there an actual cultural change between, let's say Clovis and Folsom, or was the projectile point style the only major change? In that particular example, Clovis people were hunting mammoths as an important food supply which might have required a thicker, more robust projectile point like a Clovis whereby Folsom people were focused on smaller beasts like bison (not that a bison was small).  

The typical human seeks order and simplicity from disorder and complexity. We identify and classify items that are important to us. When I find a Paleoindian projectile point out on the prairie, the first question I ask myself is 'who dun it?'. I want to know how my newly found projectile point fits into the bigger picture of Paleoindian projectile point typology, so I can add another piece of the puzzle to the site I am surface hunting. The story of an orderly Paleoindian projectile point transition or evolution fits well with our organizational needs as humans, but was Paleoindian projectile point evolution as orderly as we want it to be?  

Figure Two - Wyoming surface found Hell Gap on the left and
a Colorado surface found Alberta on the right. By that time,
stemmed replaced indented base in Paleoindian point
typology. Easy to see how Hell Gap transitioned into Alberta. 
John Bradford Branney Collection.   

In some cases, Paleoindian life seemed quite simple; surviving was the main game in town. The details of what life was really like eleven or twelve thousand years ago are impossible to unravel from a spotty archaeological record. The prehistory of Paleoindians on the High Plains is like a thousand and one-piece jigsaw puzzle. On the cover of any modern-day jigsaw puzzle is a picture of what the completed puzzle should look like. Each piece of the puzzle only gives us a tiny inkling of the overall picture. A jigsaw puzzle is a lot like the Paleoindian archaeological record. In archaeology, we never get a complete picture of what happened at any given archaeological site. Archaeologists' knowledge is limited by the pieces of archaeological data they find. With any archaeological site, there are many knowledge gaps and a lot of conjecture. To compare archaeological data to pieces of a jigsaw puzzle seems to be a good analogy. An archaeologist might have three puzzle pieces from one corner of the site and four pieces from another corner, but they never have a complete picture. Surface artifact hunters like myself are even more limited since the artifacts we find are out of archaeological context. By using various scientific disciplines and the best "Sherlock Holmes" imitations, archaeologists and artifact hunters piece together clues from the incomplete story called Paleoindian prehistory.

My latest book. Search BEYOND the CAMPFIRE by 
John Bradford Branney on Amazon.   

While bone, fabric, and flesh deteriorate in the elements, stone projectile points hold their own, somewhat. We are guilty of using projectile point type as the be-all-to-end-all for identifying and differentiating between Paleoindian cultures or complexes. But what if Paleoindians used more than one projectile point type at the same time and at the same place? That throws a wrench in the orderly sequence of projectile points we all know and love.            

Ruthanne Knudson (2017) wrote it best with her explanation of Paleoindian projectile point typology;  

"Perhaps, the typological labeling of points has resulted in

artificial confusion of “different” complexes when indeed

people living together made differently designed

points at the same time.”        

Bravo! That is worth reading several times. It is amazing how a single sentence can explain and reinforce my belief on the subject of Paleoindian projectile points. Based on current evidence, who can say that there weren’t a few innovative Paleoindians who made Clovis and Goshen-like projectile points at the same time, or that Paleoindians were not experimenting with Folsom fluting at the same time they were making Goshen points. In fact, I have a few Paleoindian points that could be called Midland or Goshen because of the shared attributes. Projectile points are an excellent 'broad brush' technique for identifying Paleoindian cultures or complexes, but we must be wary not to let the 'tail wag the dog'. Based on our current understanding, we know that from the Clovis Complex to the Cody Complex, large mammal procurement was the main survival economy of Paleoindians, only the style of projectile points and some of the prey changed over time. As more pieces of the Paleoindian puzzle are found, we will fill in more of the cover on the Paleoindian puzzle box.  

 

Figure Three - Paleoindians probably spent most of their time trying to survive.

They would probably wonder why 'we' spend so much time and effort 

studying their stone projectile points.  

Knudson, Ruthann

2017    “The Plainview Assemblage in Context” in Plainview: The Enigmatic Paleoindian Artifact Style of the Great Plains. The University of Utah Press. Salt Lake City. 

  

CHECK OUT my WESTERN THRILLER SAND and SAGE