This Randolph Stemmed point from North Carolina is made from metavolcanic stone.  The point is from the Doerschuk site (31Mg22), Montgomery County, North Carolina, and dates to the historic period, ca. 225 BP.

 

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Coe discovered and named Randolph Stemmed points based on their presence with historic materials at the top of the sequence at the Doerschuk site.  Based on this context, he argued that the points were made in ca. 1725-1800 AD by Native Americans who lost access to guns and reverted to using the bow-and-arrow to hunt game.  Most of the arrowheads during this period, and extending back into late prehistory, were Caraway Triangular points; Coe suggested that Randolph Stemmed points were made to imitate Morrow Mountain II points, which date to the Middle Archaic period, ca. 6500-7000 BP.  According to Coe, Randolph Stemmed points were made on older flakes or bifaces which where scavenged and re-flaked.

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 43.

The artefact is curated in the North Carolina Archaeological Collection, Research Laboratories of Archaeology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, catalog no. 312a520.

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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.