This Kirk Corner-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 Early Archaic period, ca. 8900-9500 BP.

 

 

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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.

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 60.

The artefact is curated in the North Carolina Archaeological Collection, Research Laboratories of Archaeology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, catalog no. 690a437.

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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.  Coe defined North Carolina Kirk points based on those recovered from the Hardaway site.