This Kirk Corner-Notched point from North Carolina is made from metavolvanic stone.  The artefact was recovered from the Fogleman Site in Alamance County, and dates to the Early Archaic period, ca. 8900-9500 BP.

 

---

The surfaces of this point model are heavily weathered which has devitrified the surface stone and changed the stone’s colour.  The unpatinated stone is black, as can be seen in a recent break on the point’s basal corner.  The flaking on the point was thinned by percussion flaking prior to careful shaping by pressure.  The sizes of the notch scars suggest that they were made by indirect percussion with a punch.

The artefact is curated in the North Carolina Archaeological Collection, Research Laboratories of Archaeology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, catalog no. 2472a1201.

---

Kirk Corner-notched points are one of the most common dart point types from the Early Archaic period of eastern North America.  The morphology of these points varied between regions, and archaeologists have subdivided the corner-notched family into a variety of different types, including Stillwell points, Pine Tree Corner-notched points, Charleston Corner-notched points, Decatur points, and Palmer Corner-notched points.  Some archaeologists note that there seem to be small and large-sized varieties of these points, which may indicate that some of them functioned as knives rather than dart points.  Some of them are exceptionally well-made by expert bifacial percussion thinning followed by well-controlled invasive or non-invasive pressure flaking.  Kirk points sometimes have deeply serrated edges.