This Hardaway Side-notched point from North Carolina is made from metavolcanic stone.  The point is from the Hardaway Site (31St4), Stanly County, North Carolina, and dates to the Late Paleoindian Period, Dalton Complex, ca. 9900-10,500 BP.

 

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The Dalton Complex arose during the subsistence and technological transition that occurred from the Paleoindian period to the Early Archaic period.  Many archaeologists consider the Dalton Complex as ‘Late Paleoindian’ in character.  The notches on Hardaway points anticipate the notched point traditions which came to dominate the Early Archaic phases that followed.

This artefact is illustrated in Coe, Joffre L., 1964. The Formative Cultures of the Carolina Piedmont. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 54(5): Figure 58.

The artefact is curated in the North Carolina Archaeological Collection, Research Laboratories of Archaeology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, catalog no. 690a248.

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The archaeologist Joffre Coe—the ‘Father of North Carolina Archaeology’— described the early prehistory of the southeastern United States in his book, The Formative Cultures of the Carolina Piedmont.  The book is based on excavations carried out in the 1930s and 1940s, and was published in 1964.  The focus of the research was to develop chronologically-relevant pottery and stone tool typologies, and Coe’s work is still the defining work for the region and remains in use by archaeologists today.  This point was excavated from the Hardaway Site (site 31St4), where the point style was found at the bottom of the stratified sequence, in what is now referred to as the Dalton Complex.  Coe’s excavations failed to recover evidence for the still-earlier, Paleoindian occupation of the region (typified by fluted ‘Clovis’ points).  There is now emerging evidence of a ‘pre-Clovis’ occupation in that region that dates even earlier.