Dig these stories from amateur archaeologists
Professional archaeologists have much to gain by working with hobby archaeologists — as well as with anyone who has ever found an arrowhead while working in the garden.
This is especially true when studying Paleoindians, the original discoverers of America who lived here during the Ice Age – from maybe 15,000 to 10,000 years ago.
The main problem with studying Paleoindians is that generally they didn’t leave much behind. They lived in small groups and moved around a lot. This is why my advisor in graduate school warned me not to focus my dissertation research on Paleoindians. He was concerned that I wouldn’t find enough data to come to any important conclusions. I didn’t take his advice; but fortunately I found that by working with hobby archaeologists each of their individual discoveries of rare Paleoindian spear points could be combined to reveal insights about the lives of these ancient American Indians.
Alyssa Perrone, a graduate student at Kent State University, along with several colleagues, demonstrate the value of this approach in their analysis of five early Paleoindian spear points found by amateur archaeologists in northwestern Ohio. They presented their results in the Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology.
The five spear points are Clovis points, named for Clovis, New Mexico, where similar points were found among mammoth bones proving that the ancestors of American Indians were here during the Ice Age. Originally discovered by private artifact collectors all five points have been donated to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
Five spear points may not seem like a big deal, but each one provides clues to where Ohio’s Paleoindians got the flint to make their points, how they made them, how they used them, and the kinds of places where they used them.
Three of the points are made from Upper Mercer chert, which occurs more than 100 hundred miles away in Coshocton County.
The other two are made from Ten Mile Creek chert, which outcrops within about nine miles of where each of the points was found.
All the points were found near a relatively shallow section of the Maumee River, which Perrone and colleagues note is “a convenient crossing point for humans and game animals, as well as an ideal fishing spot.”
There are large Paleoindian base camp sites in central Michigan as well as in central Ohio. So far, archaeologists have not found any similarly large sites in northwestern Ohio.
Perrone and her co-authors suggest that the Maumee River valley was an important transportation corridor between these two regional centers of Paleoindian activity; but they don’t think the Paleoindians were just passing through. The two Clovis points made from Ten Mile Creek chert suggest that they stayed long enough to at least discover and use the locally available sources of flint.
The work by Perrone and her colleagues shows that every individual artifact has a story to tell, and when those stories are combined with the stories told by other artifacts, we can begin to fill in the many thousands of years of blank pages in Ohio’s history. Writing much of that history depends upon the willingness of avocational archaeologists to share their discoveries with professionals.
Brad Lepper is a curator of archaeology at the Ohio History Connection.
blepper@ohiohistory.org