Jim’s Arrowheads Are Cool!
Alibates Flint, Obsidian, Chert, Blue Glass“Maybe one of the next WedWanders can be about how cool Jim’s arrow heads are? With pics!” asked Kerri after reading last week’s WW.
This query had its origin in my comment last week that Jim was advising a graduate student about lithics. Lithics is the subsection of archeology related to the use of stone, usually for tools and weapons.
Jim became fascinated with lithics early in his career. In his early twenties, wanting to have arrowheads for himself, he learned how to make them from Greg Stradiotto, one of the other young archeologists working at the excavations of Salmon Ruins in Farmington, New Mexico. Learning to knap (make points or other stone tools, such as scrapers and axes) takes a lot of time, but out in the middle of nowhere, after a long day digging, that time was available.
As he progressed in the art, Jim rapidly realized that the flakes left over from making arrowheads (usually called “projectile points,” by archeologists, because it’s often not possible to tell if they originally were used to tip an arrow or a spear or a dart) told him a lot about the stone detritus he found on sites. It’s rare to find an intact point, but there are lots of flakes, as well as cores (the chunks of rock from which the blank used to make the point is struck off), hammerstones, and, most fun of all, failed efforts that mirrored his own struggles. He’d often feel a real kinship with that long ago knapper.
For a while, Jim collected the debitage (leftover bits) from his own knapping. He would weigh this, with and without the finished point. In this way, he was able to arrive at a pretty good guess as to how much they were retrieving from their screening at sites.
Although most folks think of points as being made from flint (which is the reason people talk of “flintknapping” as if this means the same thing as “the making of points), Jim mostly works in obsidian, which is volcanic glass. Obsidian was commonly used in the parts of the southwest where he has spent his career. It also doesn’t need to be pre-treated with heat before it can be worked, as do many types of flint or chert. (Which he has worked with as well.)
Jim also works in glass, sometimes taken from the thick bases of bottles, but also from slag glass chunks. The blue pieces in the photo associated with this are knapped from modern glass.
In addition to arrowheads, Jim has made scrapers and gunflints (that’s the squarish thing in the picture). Many of his pieces end up displayed in shadowboxes, but he’s made some into jewelry or other ornaments.
Jim would be happy to answer questions, if you have them. And, Kerri, I hope this was cool enough for you!
