A Projectile Point Guide for the Upper Mississippi River Valley

by Robert F. Boszhardt

Overview

The most common relics of the 12,000-year occupancy of the Upper Mississippi River Valley may be the chipped stone projectile points that Native Americans fastened to the ends of their spears, darts, and arrow shafts. This useful guide provides a key to identifying the various styles of points found along the Upper Mississippi River in the Driftless region stretching roughly from Dubuque, Iowa, to Red Wing, Minnesota, but framed within a somewhat larger area extending from the Rock Island Rapids at the modern Moline-Rock Island area to the Falls of St. Anthony at Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Logging tens of thousands of miles and visiting private collectors from all walks of life since 1982, Robert Boszhardt has documented thousands of projectile points found in this region. In addition to drawings of each style, he provides other accepted names as well as names of related points, age, distribution, a description (including length and width), material, and references for each type. The guide is meant for the many avocational archaeologists who collect projectile points in the Upper Midwest and will be a useful reference tool for professional field archaeologists as well.

Emphasizing the preservation of sites as well as a mutual exchange of information between professional and avocational archaeologists, this guide will reveal projectile points as clues to the past, time markers which embody crucial information about the cultures of the Mississippi River Valley's early inhabitants.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781587294419
Publisher:	University of Iowa Press
Publication date:	04/01/2005
Series:	Bur Oak Guide , #1
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	104
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

 Robert Boszhardt is associate director of the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. They have each spent more than twenty years as archaeologists in this area, and they have a strong interest in public archaeology.

Table of Contents

 Table of contents: 

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Site Recording Form
Point Features and Terminology

Early Paleo Fluted Spear Points:
Clovis
Folsom/Midland
Eastern Fluted (Gainey)

Late Paleo Lanceolate Points:
Plainview
Agate Basin
Hell Gap
Frederick/Allen/Browns Valley
Eden/Scottsbluff
Dalton/Quad
Hi-Lo/Price Stemmed/Chesrow

Early Archaic Stemmed and Corner-Notched Points:
Hardin Barbed
Thebes
St. Charles
Kessell Side-Notched
Kirk Corner-Notched

Middle Archaic Stemmed and Side-Notched Points:
Matanzas
Raddatz Side-Notched/Osceola

Late Archaic Stemmed and Corner-Notched Points:
Preston Corner-Notched
Durst Stemmed

Early Woodland Stemmed Points:
Kramer
Waubesa Contracting Stem/Dickson Broad Blade

Middle Woodland Broad Corner-Notched Points:
Snyders Corner-Notched/Manker Corner-Notched
Steuben Expanded Stemmed/McCoy Corner-Notched/Monona Stemmed

Late Prehistoric Woodland and Oneota Arrowheads:
Honey Creek Corner-Notched
Cahokia/Grant Side-Notched
Madison Triangular

Bibliography
Index