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.    

Platter Chatter Along the Shadows on the Trail

 

Platter Chatter

By John Bradford Branney

Figure 1 – a trio of Clovis platters cached in southeastern Wyoming and discovered by a highway department employee in the late 1950s or early 1960s. For scale, the middle artifact is 7.9 inches long. John Bradford Branney photograph and collection.

Figure 1 is a photograph of a cache of three Clovis platters surface found in the late 1950s or early 1960s by a gentleman who worked for the Wyoming Highway Department. The exact location of the find is unknown, but according to his niece, he found the cache while working on a highway in southeastern Wyoming. Based on that information, I assume he was in either Goshen or Laramie County. When the finder passed away, much of the information about the Clovis platter cache died with him.

The finder’s niece ended up with the collection. She knew little about artifacts and placed the cache into storage, where it lay for approximately twenty-five years. Approximately seventeen years ago, Frank Parrish, a collector and hunter of Paleoindian artifacts, met the niece at a rock and gem show in Tucson, Arizona. Long story short, Mr. Parrish made an offer for the cache, and she accepted. Mr. Parrish saved this cache from a lifetime stuck in a storage locker and/or eternal obscurity. Mr. Parrish sold the cache to me in 2021.

In the literature, authors refer to this type of artifact as platters (Patten 1999; 2005), or ovate bifaces (Waters and Jennings 2015), or discoidal cores (Bradley, Collins, and Hemmings 2010). I will refer to them as Clovis platters because that best physically describes them. These platters have features that are distinctive to Clovis biface thinning, such as wide flakes and spacing, overshot and over-the-face flake scars, alternate flake sequencing, end thinning, and, on at least one of the platters, Clovis biface striking platforms as shown in Figure 2 (Bradley, Collins, and Hemming 2010: p 67).

Figure 2 – Clovis biface platform characteristics from page 67 in 

Clovis Technology by Bradley, Collins, and Hemming.

In Clovis Technology, Bradley pointed out that overshot flaking was not a common feature and that in most cases it resulted from knapping errors. The same authors noted that overshot flaking was one marker for defining Clovis biface technology. The authors proclaimed that investigators have yet to find discoidal cores (platters) in Clovis camp or kill site settings, prehistoric quarries, or near the sources of the same raw material.

What did the Clovis people use platters for? I like to think of them as portable rock supplies. They either cached them as a backup plan or used them on their wandering to make tools and projectile points. Tankersley (2002: p. 115) described how eight of the nine pieces in the Crook County Clovis Cache were a rock type called Tiger Chert, and the source for Tiger Chert was more than three hundred miles southwest of where Harold Erickson discovered the Clovis cache in Crook County, Wyoming. A Clovis individual, or perhaps a beast of burden such as a dog, hauled these Clovis platters and stone tools from southwestern Wyoming for three hundred miles before caching them within a thin lens of red ochre in the Fox Hills Formation in northeastern Wyoming. Obviously, the Clovis individual never returned to retrieve the cache.

The maker of the Clovis platters in Figure 1 used what appears to be orthoquartzite material from the Spanish Diggings prehistoric rock quarry in southwestern Niobrara County, Wyoming. For thousands of years, prehistoric people mined orthoquartzite and chert from the Mesozoic Cloverly Formation at Spanish Diggings. The orthoquartzite from the quarry ranges in color from bright yellow to gold, tan, brown, gray, pink, lavender, and purplish hues. 

Figure 3 – Looking in a westerly direction at the prehistoric rock quarry called 

Spanish Diggings in Niobrara County, Wyoming. On the horizon is Laramie Peak.

Photograph by Neil A. Waring.

Based on what we know about the provenance of the cache, the highway worker who found them was working on some road in southeastern Wyoming. If that were the case, the finder could have been anywhere from ten to one hundred or so miles from Spanish Diggings when he discovered the cache.

Figure 4 – Side A of Clovis platter A 321 made from Spanish Diggings orthoquartzite. This platter
is 6.9 inches long (176 mm). John Bradford Branney photograph and collection.

Clovis platter A 321 (Figure 4) is an oval-shaped biface that is 176 millimeters long, 102 millimeters wide, and approximately 19 millimeters thick near the center of the biface. It has a width-to-thickness ratio of 5.4. The rock type is a moderate orange-pink orthoquartzite with hues of gray throughout the matrix and scattered manganese dendrites. Clovis knappers’ special skill was percussion flaking, and this platter reflects that expertise. The flaking scars are classic Clovis technology: thin, straight, wide, and long. The marginal edges have a minor amount of secondary sharpening. There is no visual evidence of red ochre on the surface or within the cracks or hinges of the platter.

Figure 5 - Hillside made of red ochre.   

Oftentimes, Clovis people covered or buried their caches in a mineral called red ochre. Ochre is an earthy pigment consisting of ferric oxide and clay minerals. It varies from shades of light yellow to brown to red. There is archaeological evidence that prehistoric people in both the Old and New Worlds used red ochre as a pigment for painting, a preservative, an abrasive, and a packing material. Neanderthals in Europe used ochre as early as 250,000 years ago, and investigators have found ochre in Upper Paleolithic graves in Europe and in one Clovis grave in North America.

Investigators have found red ochre in a variety of contexts within North America, such as occupation floors, burials, stone tool caches, and at least one prehistoric mine. Investigators have found red ochre on a Paleoindian grinding slab and on stone artifacts, foreshafts, main shafts, atlatl fragments, and cave walls. Although it appears red ochre had ritualistic uses, it also served several practical applications.

Figure 6 – Clovis platter A 321 A made from a moderate brown Spanish Diggings 

orthoquartzite. This platter is 7.9 inches long (201 mm). 

John Bradford Branney photograph and collection.

Clovis platter A 321 A (Figure 6) is a leaf-shaped biface that is 201 millimeters long, 119 millimeters wide, and approximately 30 millimeters thick near the center of the biface. It has a width-to-thickness ratio of 4. The rock type is a moderate brown orthoquartzite with scattered blotches of pale yellowish-brown. The flaking scars are typical of Clovis; wide, long, and traveling a good distance across both faces of the biface. The marginal edges show little secondary sharpening. There is evidence of battering and crushing along the edges.

Master flintknapper Bob Patten (1999:93-94) wrote that although platters were many times larger and heavier than ultrathin knife forms, the production process was similar. As a master flintknapper, Patten opined that Clovis platter technology was as sophisticated as any knapping technology used by later cultures. Patten proposed that the Clovis people might have carried these platters in a leather sling or pouch, and when the timing was right, they would cache them or convert them into projectile point preforms or tools. Tankersley (2002: 116) found a diagonal pattern of red ochre on two of the Crook County bifaces, suggesting that the owner of the bifaces might have wrapped them in sinew or leather.

To replicate Clovis platters via flintknapping, Patten described how he beveled, battered, and abraded the edges to make it easier to remove large flakes via percussion. Then, he spaced each blow with his hammer wide enough so that the flake scars overlapped ever so slightly.

Figure 7 – Side A of Clovis platter A 321 B. This platter is 8 inches long (203 mm). 

On one edge, the knapper intentionally notched the platter 

and on the other edge, the knapper had prepared to notch it with 

Clovis biface platforms (see figures 2 and 8). 

John Bradford Branney photograph and collection.

Clovis platter A 321 B (Figures 7 and 8). This is the most interesting platter of the trio. The platter shape lies somewhere between oval and leaf-shaped. It is 203 millimeters long, 130 millimeters wide, and approximately 26 millimeters thick for a width-to-thickness ratio of 5. The knapper used a grayish orange pink orthoquartzite to make the artifact.

The knapper intentionally notched one side of Platter A 321 B in the middle of the edge. He or she was preparing to notch the other edge when the knapper cached it with the other two platters. The opposite edge (Figure 8) shows at least two Clovis biface platforms, which the knapper would have used to strike and detach flakes with the intention of notching into the body of the biface. Notches weaken the biface body enough to split the platter into sections, which the knapper would use for Clovis projectile points or other stone tools.

Figure 8 – "A" marks the beaten and the battered edge of side B of A 321 B. 

"P" marks typical Clovis biface platforms. The Clovis knapper was starting to notch this edge. 

Compare the characteristics of the platform with Figure 2 above. 

John Bradford Branney photograph and collection. 

So, why did the Clovis people cache these platters and other tools? Archaeologists and collectors have discovered Clovis-type artifacts in forty-eight states, Mexico, and Canada. The Clovis people traveled long distances in a relatively short time period. Based on thirty-two radiocarbon ages, Waters, Stafford, and Carlson (2020) proposed that Clovis technology lasted from around 13,050 to 12,750 calendar years ago. Clovis people were explorers, and when they reached areas where they were unsure of the raw material supply, they left a cache of stone tools and rock material to retrieve later. 

Time for me to get a little “preachy.” One big lesson I learned from this cache is to fully document the details and location of every artifact I find or acquire as accurately and completely as possible to ensure relevant information about the artifacts is available after I am no longer above ground. We should all do this. Artifacts are history, just not pretty rocks or works of art.

It is unfortunate that when the finder of this important discovery passed on, the provenance details went with him. I have a dozen or so questions about this cache, but those answers will never be known. We will never know where he found the cache, or under what circumstances. Was the cache found on the surface or buried? Did the road-building equipment unearth it? Did the finder investigate whether there were other pieces in the cache? My list of questions is practically endless. Unfortunately, I can ask all the questions I want until I am blue in the face, but I will never know the answers.

References Cited

Bradley, Bruce A., Michael B. Collins, and Andrew Hemmings
2010     Clovis Technology. International Monographs in Prehistory. Archaeological Series                 17. Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Patten, Bob
1999     Old Tools – New Eyes. Stone Dagger Publications. Denver.

2005     People of the Flute. Stone Dagger Publications. Denver.

Tankersley, Kenneth
2002     In Search of Ice Age Americans. Gibbs Smith, Publisher. Layton, Utah.

Waters, Michael R. and Thomas A. Jennings
2015     The Hogeye Clovis Cache. Texas A & M University. College Station.

Waters, Michael R., Thomas W. Stafford Jr., and David L. Carlson
2020     The Age of Clovis – 13,050 to 12,750 cal yr B.P. in Science Advances, Vol. 6, No.                 43.

About the Author

John Bradford Branney is a Wyoming native, an author, a geologist, a prehistorian, and an associate editor of Prehistoric AMERICAN. He has written thirteen books and over one hundred articles on Prehistoric America and life in general. Branney is currently writing the second edition of WINDS of EDEN, the third book in the prehistoric adventure series SHADOWS on the TRAIL Hexalogy. He lives in the northern Colorado mountains with his family.

CLICK for JOHN Bradford BRANNEY Books

Pryor Stemmed Points - Just Like Rolling the Dice!

Figure One - Probable Pryor Stemmed dart point/knife form in its original
un-resharpened condition. John Bradford Branney Collection.   



"Medium to large stemmed projectile points with alternately beveled edges. Lateral edges vary from parallel to convex and are alternately beveled with the bevel on the right (tip up). Beveling extends at least from the tip to the shoulder, and on some specimens extends the full length of the stem."  

- Wilfred M. Husted's original Pryor Stemmed description.  

The photograph above is probably a 2.1-inch long Pryor Stemmed projectile point or knife form surface found on a private ranch in southern Wyoming. The maker of that point used what appears to be Spanish Diggings orthoquartzite from the famous prehistoric rock quarries in east-central Wyoming. The point exhibits excellent tip-up, parallel-oblique flaking patterns from the lower right to the upper left. The projectile point or knife form appears to be in its first stage, in other words, its original knapped state. Its maker/user never resharpened and/or beveled its edges. 

I wrote probably about the artifact in Figure one because I am not one-hundred percent positive that it is a Pryor Stemmed projectile point as defined by Husted (1969:51). The Pryor Stemmed projectile point type possessed a few distinguishing features according to Husted's point type description but unfortunately not all suspected Pryor Stemmed points possess those distinguishing features. That makes it nearly impossible to identify a Pryor Stemmed point out of archaeological context if it is missing one or two of those distinguishing features. 

I can surface find a Cody Complex or a Folsom or a Clovis point out on the prairie and I pretty much know what I have in my hand. There is usually no mistaking those projectile point types. But, unless I find a Pryor Stemmed projectile point or knife form that possesses one, two, three, or more of its distinguishing features, I cannot be sure that it is a Pryor Stemmed point. They are easily confused with other projectile point types or with no known projectile point type at all. 

Figure Two - A few of the original Pryor Stemmed
points from Bottleneck Cave (Husted 1969:52) 

Where was the Pryor Stemmed projectile point type first documented?     

In an archaeological salvage operation between the years 1962 and 1964, seven archaeological sites along Big Horn Canyon in Wyoming and Montana were investigated. Under the direction of Wilfred Husted (1969) of the National Park Service, the investigators documented the sites and Husted was responsible for proposing the name Pryor Stemmed for a new projectile point type excavated in Bottleneck Cave. The bi-beveled points were named after Pryor Mountain in Montana to the north of the site. Figure two represents Pryor Stemmed projectile points that Husted and associates found in Bottleneck Cave on those salvage operations. 

Later in 1971, Frison (2014:147) excavated Schiffer Cave along the North Fork of the Powder River in the southeastern Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming. The investigators discovered several complete and partial bi-beveled points designated as Pryor Stemmed. The two firepits in the cave dated at around 8,450 RCYBP (uncorrected radiocarbon years).   

George Frison (1991:71) reported that the Pryor Stemmed projectile point or knife form tied to a distinctive archaeological horizon in the Pryor and Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming and Montana. Radiocarbon dates indicated that Pryor Stemmed projectile points were between 8,300 to 7,800 years old (uncorrected radiocarbon years). 

Originally, archaeologists assumed that the distribution for Pryor Stemmed projectile points or knife forms was limited to the mountains and foothills around the Pryor and Big Horn Mountains of Montana and Wyoming, but surface finds at other High Plains locales, including plains and prairie environments broadened that distribution. I have personally surface found several probable Pryor Stemmed projectile points or knife forms as far south as northern Colorado and as far north as Montana. The true distribution range for Pryor Stemmed projectile points most likely exceeds my artifact-hunting range.

What is a Pryor Stemmed projectile point? 

As earlier mentioned, figure two is a drawing of projectile points that the investigators at Bottleneck Cave categorized as Pryor Stemmed points. The following description was given by Husted (1969:51) for the fourteen Pryor Stemmed projectile points excavated at Bottleneck Cave: 

"Medium to large stemmed projectile points with alternately beveled edges. Lateral edges vary from parallel to convex and are alternately beveled with the bevel on the right (tip up). Beveling extends at least from the tip to the shoulder, and on some specimens extends the full length of the stem. Serration of lateral edges ranges from fine and even through rough and irregular to nearly nonexistent. Serrations were made on the beveled edge; The amount of beveling and the quality of material used determined the fineness of the serrations." 

Husted mentioned that stem lengths were from one-fifth to one-third of the total length of the point, that shouldering could be prominent to nonexistent, and that chipping ranged from crude parallel oblique to random. He wrote that description with so much variability that the description is difficult to use for identifying Pryor Stemmed projectile points found outside of archaeological and stratigraphical context.  

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The three critical diagnostic features for Pryor Stemmed points in Husted's description were 1). basal stemming, 2). alternate edge beveling, and 3). parallel-oblique flaking. However, not all of the Pryor Stemmed points that Husted found at Bottleneck Cave or other sites possessed the last two diagnostic features. Later in the article, I will explore whether it is even possible to identify Pryor Stemmed projectile points out of archaeological context without those last two distinguishing features. 

Frison (2014:149) further muddied the water with the Pryor Stemmed projectile point type when he noted that the alternate edge beveling was not even present on the archetype (the original point used to define the Pryor Stemmed projectile point type). Frison noted that the alternate edge beveling appeared to be part of an ongoing resharpening process throughout the life of the point. That appears to be the case for the projectile point in Figure one. I believe it was a 'first stage' Pryor Stemmed projectile point that was never resharpened, thus it retained its original form with a lenticular cross-section and parallel-oblique pressure flaking. 

When a prehistoric hunter used a Pryor Stemmed projectile point, it eventually became dull or perhaps broken. The prehistoric hunter would then resharpen the projectile point in a manner that created steep beveled edges on alternate sides of the projectile point. In some cases, the beveling process produced serrated edges depending on the material and the knapping process. With resharpening and beveling, the original lenticular cross-section of the projectile point or knife form became more of a trapezoidal cross-section. There are examples of Pryor Stemmed projectile points and knife forms where the alternate-side beveling was so extensive that the blade edges were much narrower than the stem. 

Figure Three - Probable 2.4-inch long Pryor Stemmed knife form surface
found in northeastern Colorado. John Bradford Branney Collection. 

Figure three is another example from my collection that I believe was a Pryor Stemmed knife form that I surface recovered on private land in northeastern Colorado on July 27th, 2014. Originally, I thought the knife form fell within the realm of the McKean Complex (Middle Archaic) but the more I studied it, the more I convinced myself it was from the Late Paleoindian/Early Archaic time frame and an example of a Pryor Stemmed knife form. The flaking on this knife form was just too fine for McKean and the stem and base were ground and polished smooth. The point was missing parallel oblique flaking but it does have a slight right-hand bevel on one side. The site where I found this point has produced surface finds from Early Paleoindian to Late Prehistoric and everything in between.  

Figure Four - 1.85-inch long Pryor Stemmed
knife form or projectile point, beveled and used 
up. John Bradford Branney Collection.   

Figure four is an example of an exhausted Pryor Stemmed projectile point from my collection, surface recovered on private land in northern Colorado. Note the intense and steep right-hand bevel along the edge of the exhausted point. The other side of the point is beveled as severely as the first side. The prehistoric hunter resharpened that point so many times that the beveled blade edges were narrower than the stem. It is apparent to me that the prehistoric hunter resharpened that point many times while it was still hafted on a knife handle or dart tip. 

Based on archaeological evidence, aggressive beveling was a common practice for the people who used and made Pryor Stemmed projectile points. Deliberate burination appeared on a few Pryor Stemmed points and knives as well. Burination occurred when the knapper used transverse breaks on the point as striking platforms to resolve a hafting issue or to create a chisel-like tip. I personally don't have any Pryor Stemmed projectile points with burins in my collection, but I have a few burinated points from the earlier Cody Complex. 

Where did the Pryor Stemmed projectile point and its technology originate?

Husted (1969:86) hypothesized that Pryor Stemmed technology and form might have evolved from the Scottsbluff point of the Cody Complex. The two projectile point types do share a resemblance. Both point types had basal stemming and the time frame between the two technologies appeared to be reasonable. While the last of the Scottsbluff and other Cody Complex projectile points were transitioning out, Pryor Stemmed projectile points could have stepped in as a new technology. I wrote Pryor Stemmed projectile points could have stepped in as a new technology because the post-Cody Complex period saw a plethora of Late Paleoindian/Early Archaic projectile point types showing up on the plains and in the mountains. Those included Pryor Stemmed, James Allen, Frederick, Lovell Constricted, Lusk, Deception Creek, and several other unnamed point styles. Most of those projectile point types fall within what Frison (1991:67) called the Foothill-Mountain Paleoindian Group or the  Parallel-Oblique Point Complex (Frison 1991:393). The projectile point field became quite crowded with the only common thread between them being the occasional use of parallel oblique flaking.

Brunswig (2007:279) addressed parallel oblique flaking in late Paleoindian artifact assemblages by proclaiming that while early Paleoindians used techniques that created transverse flake scars (blade edge to blade edge), late Paleoindians applied flaking processes that created angled or parallel-oblique flaking scars. Brunswig suggested that although there appeared to be a strong bias toward parallel-oblique flaking in late Paleoindian artifact assemblages, transverse and parallel-oblique flaking patterns were not diagnostic features for either early or late Paleoindians.       

The photograph in Figure five illustrates a possible projectile point evolution from Cody Complex to Pryor Stemmed, and then to the McKean Complex. The High Plains projectile points/knife forms are from my collection and represent three different time periods. The three points in the left row are what I consider Cody Complex points; the three points in the middle row are what I call Pryor Stemmed points, and the three points in the right row are what I cataloged as McKean Complex points from the Middle Archaic. 

Figure Five - Cody Complex, Pryor Stemmed, and McKean Complex projectile points 
and knife forms from the author's collection. 

What happened to the Pryor 

Stemmed projectile point? 

Based on radiocarbon dates, the Pryor Stemmed style appeared in artifact assemblages for a few centuries around 8000 years ago (uncorrected radiocarbon date). After that, Pryor Stemmed disappeared from the archaeological record. Husted (1969:86-87) proposed a possible link between the older Pryor Stemmed projectile point and the younger McKean Complex projectile points. Figure five compares three Pryor Stemmed points and three McKean Shouldered points from my collection. There definitely looks like a connection, but Husted and others could not account for the two to three-thousand-year gap between the end of Pryor Stemmed points and the beginning of McKean Shouldered points. I cannot reconcile that time gap either. 

I emphasized in the article that not all of the Pryor Stemmed projectile points found in the mentioned archaeological sites possessed two of the three distinguishing features defined by Husted for the type: parallel oblique flaking and alternate edge beveling. That makes it a challenge when identifying a surface found stemmed point that does not have those two distinguishing features. Instead of Pryor Stemmed, a point without those distinguishing features could be a McKean Shouldered point or a Cody Complex point! If an archaeologist finds a stemmed point in situ and it has stratigraphic and archaeological control within the right time frame, there is a better than average chance that point is Pryor Stemmed. However, things change out on the wide-open prairie. If I happened to be walking along and stumble upon a stemmed point lying on the ground, it might be a Pryor Stemmed projectile point if it has the parallel oblique flaking or the alternate edge beveling. If it does not have either of those features, identification becomes more difficult, and quite frankly, anyone's guess. Even though I might document that point as Pryor Stemmed, I can never be one hundred percent sure that was what it was. Identifying Pryor Stemmed projectile points is sometimes just like rolling the dice!         

References Cited. 

Brunswig, Robert H., and  Bonnie L. Pitblado. 2007. "Paleoindian Cultural Landscapes and Archaeology of North-Central Colorado's Southern Rockies" in Frontiers in Colorado Paleoindian Archaeology. University Press of Colorado. Boulder.    

Frison, George C. 1991. Prehistoric Hunters of the High Plains. Second Edition. Academic Press, Inc. New York. 

Frison, George C. 2014. Rancher Archaeologist. University of Utah Press. Salt Lake.  

Husted, Wilfred M. 1969. Bighorn Canyon Archeology. Publications in Salvage Archeology, Number 12. Smithsonian Institution Press. Washington D.C.         

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 earned 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.