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Tutorial on
Projectile Points
of the Tall Grass Prairie PeninsulaThis tutorial is made to accompany the forthcoming book, The Tall Grass Prairie Peninsula: Its Role in Shaping American Culture. The tutorial deals mostly with the chapter on projectile points (obviously) but to some extent also with the chapters on the prehistory of the prairie and innovation diffusion.
As noted in that book, surface collected points often differ substantially from the kinds of pristine points usually illustrated in books and on websites, points usually taken from burial and other archaeological sites. The point a surface collector is more likely to find was never intended to be anything more than a workaday piece, and by the time it was lost or discarded on the prairie a long service of hard use and resharpening might have taken its toll. With that in mind, this tutorial puts at least as much emphasis on identifying the various characteristics that might still be evident on a field grade piece as it does on identifying pristine museum quality pieces.
Moreover, surface collected points are almost never found in an archaeological context that tells us a wealth of information about the point. Indeed, although sometimes a number of similar points are found in the same general area, in a woeful number of instances that is not the case. Often a point is found that does not seem to fit into any pattern of other points also found in that area.
Perhaps a word is in order about the nature of tutorials. Tutorials are made up of a progression of frames with horizontal lines at the top and bottom to denote the boundaries of the frame. The introduction you are reading now consists of a single frame.
In any tutorial it is important to follow the progression forward and backward by clicking on links to go forward and and using the back arrow button of your browser to go back. Do not just use the scroll bar or mouse wheel to scroll up and down the file through the various frames. If the frame is too large to fit on the screen at one time, use the scroll bar or mouse wheel to move up and down the frame, but don't use those techniques to scroll from one frame to another. If you do that nothing will make sense at all.
Feel free to use the back button on your browser to review material you have already covered.
Click here to begin the tutorial.
DOCUMENT INFORMATION
This document: http://www.prairienet.org/prairienations/TutorPoint/F0.htm
Prairie Nations Home Page: http://www.prairienet.org/prairienations
Author: Jim Fay
Comments to: jfay@prairienet.org
Nothing down here. This is out of the frame.