#spear points

Texas A&M University researchers have discovered what are believed to be the oldest weapons ever found in North America: ancient spear points that are 15,500 years old. The findings raise new questions about the settlement of early peoples on the continent.

Michael Waters, distinguished professor of anthropology and director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M, and colleagues from Baylor University and the University of Texas have had their work published in the current issue of Science Advances.

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Careful examination of numerous fluted spear points found in Alaska and western Canada prove that the Ice Age peopling of the Americas was much more complex than previously believed, according to a study done by two Texas A&M University researchers.

Heather Smith and Ted Goebel both were involved with the study that was associated with the Center for the Study of the First Americans, part of the Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M. Smith is now an assistant professor at Eastern New Mexico University.

Their work has been published in the current issue of PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).

Smith, who worked on the study as part of her Ph.D. at Texas A&M, and Goebel, professor of anthropology at Texas A&M, believe the findings could change how we view the traveling patterns and routes of early humans from 14,000 to 12,000 years ago as they settled in numerous parts of North America.

Using new digital methods of analyses utilized for the first time in such a study of these artifacts, the researchers found that early settlers in the emerging ice-free corridor of interior western Canada "were travelling north to Alaska, not south from Alaska, as previously interpreted," says Goebel.

"Although during the late Ice Age there were two possible routes for the first Americans to follow on their migration from the Bering Land Bridge area southward to temperate North America, it now looks like only the Pacific coastal route was used, while the interior Canadian route may not have been fully explored until millennia later, and when it was, primarily from the south.

"The findings of these fluted spear points provide archaeological evidence supporting new genetic models explaining how humans colonized the New World."

Traditional interpretations of the peopling of the Americas have predicted that early inhabitants migrated from Siberia through Alaska, and then followed the ice-free corridor that gradually opened in western Canada to reach the Great Plains of the western U.S. But newer genetic studies of ancient Siberians, Alaskans, and Americans, as well as the discovery of new sites south of the Canadian ice sheets predating the opening of the ice-free corridor, suggest instead that the first Americans passed along the Pacific coast.

"The key is that the projectile points are related in their technology and morphology, and the way in which some of these characteristics vary forms the pattern of an ancestral-descendent relationship. This suggests that the people who carried the artifacts to these locations were related as well." adds Smith.

"It shows that these early people in western Canada and Alaska were descendent of Clovis (the first settlers of North America) and they used the same type of weapons to hunt for food, especially bison. These makers of fluted points were not just all over mid-continent North America but were also migrating northward back to the Arctic."

These artifacts can be used to document migration patterns of prehistoric peoples, she says.

"The spear points prove that the peopling of the Americas was much more complex than we had believed and that these early settlers went in a lot of different directions, not just south. We now have a better picture of what weapons they used to hunt and where their travels took them."

"This is tangible evidence of a connection between people in the Arctic and the Mid-continent 12,000 years ago, a connection which may be either genetic or social, but ultimately, speaks volumes of the capability and adaptability of early cultures in North America," she notes.

Ancient North Americans hunted with spear points crafted to absorb shock.

Clovis people, who crossed a land bridge from Asia to North America around 13,500 years ago, fashioned stone weapons that slightly crumpled at the base rather than breaking at the tip when thrust into prey, say civil engineer Kaitlyn Thomas of Southern Methodist University in Dallas and colleagues. The Clovis crumple rested on a toolmaking technique called fluting, in which a thin groove was chipped off both sides of a stone point’s base, the researchers report in the May Journal of Archaeological Science.

One of the most remarkable things I’ve experienced in this project (and, believe me, there is a long list of remarkable things) is making the rubbings of ancient spearpoints, arrow heads, and copper tools. It was back in 2015 when we first tested this technique, and earlier this year when the whole crew went out to make our final rubbing images.

But the rubbings are only the first step. From these, Paul worked a bit of his digital image processing into the process: after sorting the rubbings out, Paul did a high-resolution scan of the selected pieces, and brought them into photoshop.

The challenge here—and in any printing technique—is to represent the original in a meaningful and understandable way. Letterpress is a relief printing process, basically only able to produce areas of solid ink, or unprinted areas of paper white. However, like a black and white photograph, the rubbings have a whole range of beautiful tones between the blackest blacks and the paper whites.

In order to transform the toned rubbings into something that we can use for relief printing, Paul used a digital version of Gaylord’s engraving techniques (admittedly far more crudely): turning intermediate tones into very fine linework that would both represent the tonality of the rubbings as well as suggesting the contours.

That photoshop file can then be used to create a high contrast linotronic negative (by Smart Set Printing, in NE Minneapolis), and with the help again of Chip Schilling of Indulgence Press, we created several polymer printing plates.

You can see here four different spear points (all at 100% of original size), the result of the rubbing of the fish hook, and a little text just for fun. And all of Paul’s line work.

After proofing these, we sent to find the composition and color which would work well for the “Confluence” image. Here Greta and Barb are fine tuning the placement of two spear points.

Owing to the strength of Gaylord’s magnetic base (each of those little black rectangles is a powerful magnet!), positioning and alignment is tricky—and painful, if you happen to let the plate “snap” down on your fingers.

The final version is a subtle, but beautiful addition to the composition. 

Despite a lack of archaeological evidence, the first North Americans have often been depicted hunting with spear-throwers, which are tools that can launch deadly spear points at high speeds. But now, a new analysis of microscopic fractures on Paleo-Indian spear points provides the first empirical evidence that America's first hunters really did use these weapons to tackle mammoths and other big game.

The new study has implications for scientists' understanding of the way Paleo-Indians lived, researchers say.