by Gregory Vogel

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2008 November 4
No Stone Left Unnamed

            Etley, Gibson, Godar, Hardin, Helton, Kampsville, Klunk, Koster, Peisker, Schild and Snyder: all are familiar town and family names in this area.  You may be surprised to know that they're also familiar to archeologists throughout the U.S. as the names of specific types of stone tools, known to archeologists as "points".

            Over the thousands of years people lived on this continent, they made hundreds of different types of stone knives, spear tips and arrow points.  Archeologists have given names to each different type, and a surprisingly large number of these names come from western Illinois.

            Why do stone tools get the names they do?  Most are named after a town or archeological site where they were first scientifically documented.  Hardin Barbed and Kampsville Barbed are both named after towns in Calhoun County.  Koster Points are named for the Koster Site in Greene County, which was named for the landowners Theodore and Mary Koster.  Koster Points are small, distinctive spear points with notches into the corners of the base, dating from about A.D. 600 to 900.
 
            Other stone tools are given names simply because of their shape.  Here's a trivia question: How did the Wadlow point (dating to about 2,000 B.C.) get its name?  It might help if I tell you that Wadlow points are very large, broad and up to fifteen inches or more in length.  The answer?  They were named after Robert Wadlow, Alton's "gentle giant" and at 8 feet 11.1 inches the tallest person in the world. 

            Stone tools are ideal artifacts for the study of past societies for a number of reasons.  Like tools today, each stone artifact was carefully made for a specific purpose or set of tasks: slicing food, hunting deer, shaping wood, scraping hides, cutting reeds, or any combination of jobs that required a sharp edge.  If we make sense of the stone tools and decipher how they were used, we understand something about the people who made and used them. 

            To the untrained eye many types of stone tools look alike: more-or-less flat pieces of stone with semi-circular chipping scars, a sharp point at one end and sometimes notches near the base.  To archeologists, and certainly to the people who made and used these tools, even minor variation in their size, style, or manufacture is important.  It's difficult to determine the use of a stone tool from its shape or style alone, though.  A four-inch long tool with a narrow blade, sharp tip, and two deep notches near the base may have been used as a knife, a spear, a combination of the two, or for something completely different. 

            The material from which these tools are made (chert, also known as flint) is nearly impervious to weathering, but lucky enough for archeologists not impervious to scratching.  Each time a stone tool is used tiny marks are made on its working surface.  Using powerful microscopes today, we can document those marks and even map their orientation, indicating how the tool was used.  Scratches running tip-to-base indicate use as a spear, while side-to-side marks are common on knives.  The size and shape of the scratches sometimes even indicates what material was being cut – bone leaves long, deep scratches, while leather creates broad smoothed areas.

            We learn the most from stone tools, though, when we know exactly where they came from.  If we document that Hardin Barbed points are consistently found deeper at archeological sites than Kampsville Barbed points (and they are), we conclude that the Hardin variety is older.  Radiocarbon dates on charcoal from sites where these tools are found confirm this: Hardin Barbed points were used between about 8,000 to 6,000 B.C., while the Kampsville Barbed points are a few thousand years younger.

            The exact locations of tools can sometimes give us very personal, and even emotional, insights as well.  Several years ago I helped excavate a 5,000 year-old stone tool quarry site on the bluffs above the town of Grafton.  The occupants of this site quarried high-quality cobbles of chert from the bluffs and shaped them down into flat "blanks" that were easier to haul away, to be fashioned into formal tools somewhere else.  Like everyone today, the prehistoric toolmakers sometimes made mistakes, and we found one blank that had snapped in two before it was finished.  One half was left in a pile of debris left over from shaping it, and the other half was found close to fifteen feet away – about as far, we figured, as a frustrated person would toss it.  

            The number of stone tool types named after people or places in western Illinois demonstrates the archeological richness of this area, and the early research done here by the Center for American Archeology and other institutions.  What's in a name?  When it comes to stone tools in North America, a lot of western Illinois is. 

Dr. Gregory Vogel is Director of Research at the Center for American Archeology in Kampsville, Illinois.  He may be reached: (618) 653-4316, or gvogel@caa-archeology.org.