Saturday, October 3, 2009

Another tool for projectile point identification


As a follow-up to the post on projectile points I did two days ago, Jim thought it would be appropriate to suggest a useful website he has stumbled upon. The site is set up as a guide for identifying projectile points based on their attributes. It is part of the official website of Delaware, and can be reached here. You may wonder why we would suggest a site that deals with identifying points found in Delaware when we are working in Maryland. The reason is that many types of projectile points are found across larger regions, not to mention that Native Americans were making these points prior to the existence of state boundaries.

To use the site click on the links in accordance with the characteristics of the point you are trying to identify. I played around with the site a little bit using this point pictured to the left. I am inclined to call it a Kirk-Stemmed type, but must admit that I am no expert when it comes to point identification. It also looked a little bit like a Bare Island Point, which goes to show that a point may not always fall neatly into its proper type (this also suggests that I should keep practicing!). By no means is this a complete point type database, but it certainly is a wonderful tool to get you to start thinking about what we look for when we identify projectile points.

Hope you all are having a wonderful weekend.
Kelley

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