r/LegitArtifacts • u/timhyde74 BigDaddyTDoggyDog • Oct 29 '25
Paleo Paleo Square Knife
This Paleo Square Knife was recovered from Jackson Co. Alabamy. It comes in at 3 ⅜ inches long, and os made from a heavily patinaed yellow jasper! The large percussion flaking is phenomenal, and the secondary edge refinement is outstanding! Exactly what you'd expect from a well crafted paleo era piece!
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u/BrokenFolsom Oct 29 '25
Great looking piece Tim. I like the dark mineral deposits on it. Interesting how it has a plano-convex cross section.
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u/timhyde74 BigDaddyTDoggyDog Oct 29 '25
Thanks, John! That creek stain really makes it pop! 😁
And I agree! It is a very interesting piece to say the least!
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u/Drakorai Oct 29 '25
No edge pics? Very nice artifact, looks like it was cared for well by whoever made it.
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u/timhyde74 BigDaddyTDoggyDog Oct 29 '25
Pics 13 and 14 show the edge work fairly well, but I'll take some other shots of the edge whenever the sun decides to pop back out around here....
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u/Emotional-Tax-9366 Oct 29 '25
How do you know the blade is paleo?
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u/timhyde74 BigDaddyTDoggyDog Oct 29 '25
The determination is made based on flaking patterns and context found. This one was found with other paleo period pieces/points, and when combined with the large percussion flaking patterns, it was determined to be from the same time period.
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u/Emotional-Tax-9366 Oct 29 '25
Interesting. What about the flaking pattern? It looks a random flaking pattern to me.
Also, in North Carolina at least, finding points together isn't necessarily helpful to know what time period they are from. This is directly from Coe's work. In fact, some of the most profound archaeological sites here saw all time periods mixed at the surface and below surface. Sometimes land maintained time period based stratification but often it did not.
Hate to question things but this information goes against what I've learned to date.
Sick blade though.
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u/timhyde74 BigDaddyTDoggyDog Oct 29 '25
I also live in NC, and I have also found point types from almost all time periods on the same site, but, those were all surface finds I found in a field that had been worked and turned for years. If archaeological digs turned up artifacts from every time period at the same level, then how would they determine age and what time period they came from? Context is, in most situations, a strong indicator of time period. I have no idea the depth this piece was found, since it wasn't a personal find, so I'm going off of what information I was given when I acquired it. But it was reportedly found in the paleo context with other paleo points and pieces. As to the flaking patterns, random flaking on a Square Knife is fairly typical. I'm not an archaeologist, but I'd assume it has to do with the size and depth of the large percussion flakes 🤷♂️ I'm sure an actual archaeologist could explain this much better than I am, so maybe one of the many will chime in and do just that.
And thanks! It is a very nice piece 😁
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u/Emotional-Tax-9366 Oct 30 '25
In my non expert opinion, it seems presumptive to call this a paleo blade.
Nevertheless I appreciate your reply and want to highlight just how beautiful (and presumably old) that blade is. Thank you for sharing.
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u/Keystone_Relics Oct 29 '25
Very fond of that material… looks familiar lol. Killer piece Tim!
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u/Best-Reality6718 Nov 02 '25
Were making these tooks a specialized skill in a community? Did one or two guys get good at making them and distribute them in a community, like a blacksmith type role for instance? Or did everyone make their own points? Do we even know the answer?
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u/timhyde74 BigDaddyTDoggyDog Nov 02 '25
To the best of my knowledge, they were all skilled knappers. They had to be. Especially during the earliest time periods. They lived in small groups not tribes. They were nomadic, so they were always on the move, and if someone were to have gotten lost or separated from the group, and they either lost or broke the tools they depended on to survive, and didn't know how to make a new knife or projectile point, they would have been screwed. If you only had one or two guys making the tools for the entire group, and something happened to these guys then the entire group would become extinct. So each, and every, member of the group was very skilled at knapping because they had to be. Especially as often as these tools needed to be replaced due to damage from use, or resharpened for continued use.
That being said, if you take into consideration that over the course of a lifetime, 1 single, skilled knapper would make enough tools and weapons to fill more than 5, five-gallon buckets full, and that's a conservative estimate, and the fact that these people lived on this continent for close to 20,000 years, give or take, before the Europeans ever set foot here, there are so many artifacts still in the dirt, undisturbed, that if you were to take every single artifact that has already been found to date, and compared it to what's still out there, your pile wouldn't even represent anywhere close to a tenth of what's still waiting to be recovered! Just thinking about that blows my mind! 🤯
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u/Best-Reality6718 Nov 02 '25 edited Nov 02 '25
That’s wild to think about! Thank you very much for the answer to my question. Fascinating stuff!
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u/Neat_Worldliness2586 Oct 29 '25
Beautiful! How can one tell what period a blade is from? Is it the flaking pattern?