Astonishing “Arrowheads”*
Posted March 1, 2020
Thinking about Culture Change:
Frontiersman Daniel Boone once lived in the Yadkin River Valley of North Carolina not far from my boyhood home, and I began reading Boone biographies in middle school. At the time, I was also finding Native American “arrowheads” and “spearheads.” And, I imagined them having been left by the Cherokee and Shawnee, 18th century tribes mentioned in my readings. I had no thoughts of an earlier, prehistoric time. Later, in college, I found a copy of James B. Griffin’s Archaeology of Eastern United States and Joffre Coe’s Formative Cultures of the Carolina Piedmont. Through them, I was stunned to learn that although a few of the pieces I found might have come from the 1700s, most of my finds were several thousands of years old. What was even more surprising was that some of the tools, like the Morrow Mountain Point pictured, were made in the same way, with little variation, for approximately a two thousand years.
I often reflect on the implications of this astonishing consistency. Knowing that knowledge of how to make these tools was passed from person-to-person, generation-to-generation, I keep coming back to how quickly in the game of “Gossip” we lose the message—a word at the beginning of a circle usually results in something hilariously different at the end. Yet, these ancient folks didn’t change their tools, the artifacts were made much the same, over and over, thousands and thousands of times, time out of mind. We also see this consistency in other artifacts from these long-ago periods, and we can assume, I think, that other aspects of these ancient cultures were just as conservative. I don’t think they perceptibly changed. Of course, the environment changed. Babies were born, people died. Nevertheless, I think people would have assumed that the human life-way had always been the way they knew it, and that it would always be that way. This is similar to the way we might, erroneously, look at crows or pine trees and unconsciously assume the way they are is the way they have always been, and the way they will continue to be. Yet, we know that crows and pine trees change through time, slowly, imperceptibly. For these ancient people, stone tools were eventually made differently, but the process was so slow that I don’t think people would have noticed. The big issues came when people encountered other people from very far away who, although they looked physically similar, had a variety of cultural practices, like making stone tools, that were significantly or even dramatically different from their own. Likely they would have considered the others to be something entirely different. They might have been seen as “living terribly wrong,” perhaps even non-human. This, of course, would have been a fundamental mistake. It is the story of Babel, and it is one that continues to plague us.
- I have put “arrowheads” and “spearheads” in quotes because we now know that many of these stone artifacts were knives, dart points, scrapers, and other tools.
(Astonishing “Arrowheads” was originally posted on lelandferguson.com)