This was not a Pompeii-like situation; the points had not lain undisturbed where some Native American had discarded or lost them, for several thousand years until the day I arrived. Nevertheless, there were a few cases that suggested the water had not carried the artifacts too far away from their original location. In one particularly memorable instance, I found the mid-section of a late-stage quartz preform (an unfinished rough-out), probably for a 3,000-year old Orient Fishtail point; many months afterward, I found the tip of the preform, which refit to the other fragment perfectly along the transverse fracture. The tip lay only a few feet away from the spot where I had found the mid-section. No doubt, this accidental break was the reason the ancient toolmaker had tossed the preform away. However, I also found, on different occasions, 6,000- and 600-year-old artifacts in the same area.
Limitations of the Archaeological Record
This example illustrates the fundamental limitations of the archaeological data from the Marshlands. There is no stratigraphic vertical separation of artifacts of different age; they all lie on the same modern surface. Stone tool-making methods changed very little from the arrival of ancestral Paleoindians about 13,000 years ago until the Indians adopted metal tools and guns to replace their traditional toolkit in the mid-1600s. Thus, the chips or flakes (“debitage”) created in that process generally cannot be assigned to any particular time span or culture. The only (very rare) exception is the “channel flakes” that were incidentally produced when long flakes or “flutes” were driven off the bases of Paleoindian spearpoints; that type of debitage was no longer made after about 12,000 cal BP.
Another problem at the Marshlands is the absence of buried, sealed “features” such as fireplaces (hearths) or storage pits. When archaeologists excavate a buried hearth, we can recover charcoal, burned nutshells, and burned bone fragments. All of these organic (once living) materials can be dated using radiocarbon (14C). The same kinds of samples may be recovered from storage pits (often re-filled with debris), but the pits also sometimes contain carbonized seeds, maize kernels, or larger, identifiable animal remains that can inform us about the diets of prehistoric people. If stone artifacts are found in or very close to dated features, we can confidently apply those radiocarbon dates to those artifacts (which, being inorganic, cannot be dated using 14C).
What Can We Learn from “Projectile Points”?
Although the basic techniques for making stone tools did not change over thousands of years, the shapes of those tools did change. Archaeologists are particularly interested in the changing shapes of “projectile points.” To a lay person, these are “arrowheads.” However, we archaeologists think that the bow and arrow was adopted by indigenous peoples of North America very late in prehistory, probably after cal (calibrated) AD 500 in most regions. In the Northeast, we assume that the triangular points made after cal AD 800, and perhaps also the corner-notched points made during the preceding few centuries, really were arrowheads. When Europeans began to explore the coast in the 16th and 17th centuries the indigenous peoples (“Indians”) were using the same sort of stone triangles as the tips of arrows shot from long bows. However, the stone points made before ca. cal AD 800 were, we think, the tips of darts that were thrown with spearthrowers (or atlatls, as they were called by the Aztec of Mexico). I emphasize that we don’t really know for sure. In dry caves of the Great Basin and Southwest, and in the recently melting ice of the Yukon, the wooden shafts of these weapons are sometimes preserved, and we can tell from their butt ends if they were made to be propelled from the string of a bow or the hook of an atlatl. In the generally acidic, often wet soils of the Northeast, artifacts made of wood, bark, leather, fibers, basketry, all decayed within centuries, even decades after they were discarded. There are no preserved bows or atlatls, so we don’t know exactly when the bow replaced the spearthrower, or if they co-existed for an extended period. It is particularly perplexing that some triangular dart (?) points, made about 6,000 years ago, cannot be distinguished from the post-AD 800 arrow points.
When the first people arrived, they encountered an amazing menagerie of giant mammals such as mastodont, stag-moose, and ground sloths. By 12,700 cal BP, all of these “megafauna” were extinct, probably in part because Paleoindians had hunted them using fluted points. From that time until European Contact, the newly established Eastern deciduous forests contained an unchanging suite of relatively large mammals that included white-tailed deer, elk, and black bear. The large predators were wolves and cougars, which humans would not usually have considered edible. In some periods when grasslands expanded, bison may have briefly intruded into the region, but there is no evidence for this among identifiable bones (which, like other organic materials, are not often well preserved in the Northeast). Some “projectile points” may have functioned occasionally or primarily as knives, but most of them were designed to penetrate the hides of hunted mammals. Given that this was their primary function, and the same suite of animals was available as prey for 12,000 years, why would the shape of dart points have changed at all after that time? And if they did change, shouldn’t those changes have followed an evolutionary path toward ever-increasing efficiency?
We must not ignore another likely use of dart points, to kill other people in warfare. The oldest skeleton in North America with an embedded stone point is Kennewick Man, who lived in Washington State about 9000 cal BP. In the Northeast, the earliest direct evidence of warfare dates from only about 5800-4500 cal BP—but that may only reflect the small sample of preserved ancient bones. Male skeletons buried on Frontenac Island in Cayuga Lake in western New York exhibit unmistakable signs of violence, such as a Lamoka dart point embedded in a rib, and a point tip stuck in a skull.
Experiments have shown that a wooden spear or dart with a fire-hardened tip is as capable of penetrating hides as a stone-tipped dart. What then, is the advantage of a stone point? If it shatters after entering the animal’s body, the sharp fragments can slice through blood vessels as the animal moves, and the bleeding will hasten death.
Basically, a dart point needs to have a sharp tip, to be strong enough not to break on contact, but fragile enough to snap after entering the target. Thus, we don’t expect much deviation in shape at the tip. At the base, the point has to be attached securely to its wooden shaft, or to a detachable foreshaft. There are basically two ways to do this: the pointed or convergent base can be plugged into a round hole, or the thinned base can be set into a narrow slot. Some sort of glue, such as pine tar, can be used to secure the attachment, or the base can be tied on using sinew or thin string. In that case, usually a notch has been removed from the side or corner of the point’s base to hold the string, and the notch has been ground smooth so it won’t cut through.
Surprisingly—given these limited possibilities for variability as dictated by functional constraints– the shapes of dart points changed repeatedly in the Northeast over the course of 12,000 years, and not in a way that can be interpreted as a trend toward greater efficiency. For example, corner-notched points were used about 10,500 years ago, 6,000 years ago, and again 1400 years ago.
Around 3,000 years ago, people made Orient Fishtail points at the Marshlands. These were not notched. At about the same time, people in central and western New York were making Meadowood points, which were side-notched. I have found only eight Meadowood points at the Marshlands, as opposed to 97 intact or nearly complete Fishtail points. The Meadowood points from the Marshlands are all made of chert; the great majority of all Meadowood points in the Northeast are made of Onondaga chert, a variety that outcrops in western New York. In sharp contrast, most of the Orient points from the Marshlands are made of quartz, although the craftsmen (they probably were men, although that is not an easily testable assumption) also used quartzite, chert, and various metamorphic rocks. When an archaeologist sees these sorts of clear contemporaneous regional differences, we are pretty comfortable attributing them to distinct ethnic/cultural groups.
However, we do not have a well-developed set of theories to explain the observed changes of point styles over time. Usually, a recognizable style lasts for about 500 to 1500 years until it is replaced, often by a type that appears radically different in shape and often also in the preferred raw material. For example, about 4000 years ago, broadspears made of grainy metamorphic rocks or chert replaced small stemmed points that were made predominantly of quartz. I should note that we can place each of these styles (or types) in a time-frame because nearly identical specimens have been found within, or very near, features containing organic material that could be radiocarbon-dated. I can say, therefore, that the Orient Fishtail points at the Marshlands are about 3000 years old, because they have been closely associated with dated fireplaces on Long Island and in New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania.
Before about 1970, archaeologists would have confidently ascribed new artifact styles to the arrival of new populations that migrated into the region. Since then, we have become very hesitant to invoke migration and population replacement. Instead, archaeologists now prefer to talk about local innovation and adaptation to changing environments by resilient indigenous populations. However, recent research on ancient genes has shown that, in Eurasia, migrations have been frequent, and many near-total population replacements have occurred. For example, Neolithic farmers migrating westward from Anatolia largely replaced the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Europe between ca. 8500 and 6000 cal BP. Similar research on ancient genomes in the US and Canada has been derailed because Native Americans have been very reluctant to allow sampling of the DNA of both living people and the ancient skeletons to which they now control access.
I participated in a 2017 study of the mitochondrial DNA extracted from bones of the late prehistoric Beothuk and the 4500-year-old Maritime Archaic people of Newfoundland. Both of these groups can be broadly labeled culturally and biologically as “Indians” in contrast to “Eskimo” or “Inuit.” Around 3500 cal BP the Maritime Archaic people died out or abandoned the island and a new population of ancestral Paleo-Eskimo, arriving from the north, took their place. Later, about 2000 to 1500 years ago, another Indian population, presumably the ancestors of the Beothuk who occupied Newfoundland when Europeans arrived in the 16th century, replaced the Eskimo. However, these ancestral Beothuk were not the genetic descendants of the Maritime Archaic population. Similar population replacements probably occurred elsewhere in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions, and these events could well be reflected by the evident transitions in the archaeological record—particularly, abrupt point style changes.
