Stanly Stemmed point from North Carolina, made from metavolcanic stone.  The point is from the Doerschuk site (31Mg22), Montgomery County, North Carolina, and dates to the Middle Archaic period, ca. 7000-8000 BP.

 

 

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Stanly Stemmed points are found across  much of the eastern United States, dating somewhat later than Kirk Stemmed points.  The morphology of the base of Kirk Stemmed points were thought by Coe to anticipate the shape of Stanly Stemmed points, and Stanly Stemmed points were thought to anticipate the Savannah River points which emerge in the Late Archaic, ca. 3000-5000 BP.  Points of the Morrow Mountain family occurred in the intervening period.

The Stanly Stemmed point in this model was broken by an impact fracture, demonstrating its use as a dart point armature.

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 31.

The artefact is curated in the North Carolina Archaeological Collection, Research Laboratories of Archaeology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, catalog no. 312a288.

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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.