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On the last day of an ecology field trip to Virginia’s Eastern Shore, a biology undergraduate student discovered more than she expected. While searching for shark teeth, Brooklyn Rolph, a student at Mary Baldwin University in Virginia, stumbled upon a stone spearpoint estimated to be around 4,500 years old.
“Wow, this is so crazy,” Rolph said in a statement. Already primed to look for pointy objects underwater, Rolph found a stone spear and immediately alerted the professors running the trip. “They were ecstatic,” she recalled.
The stone artifact is about 6 inches (15 centimeters) long and, according to local archaeologists, a type known as a Lehigh/Koens-Crispin point. This kind of stone tool was made by Indigenous people across the East Coast of the U.S. from around 4,500 to 3,000 years ago. Sometimes called a “broadspear,” the stone point also may have been used as a knife by prehistoric hunter-gatherers in the Late Archaic period.
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The stone point is likely 3,000 to 4,500 years old.
(Image credit: Mary Baldwin University)
The field trip was part of an ecology course led by Mary Baldwin University faculty members who had secured a permit from the state to explore the barrier islands off the Eastern Shore, the southern part of the Delmarva Peninsula that includes most of Delaware and parts of Virginia and Maryland.
Just after a lunch break on Sept. 21, the last day of the excursion that aimed to let students study plants and animals in the coastal ecosystem, Rolph set out to quickly explore a mound of shells on the island and noticed the spearpoint at the edge of an inlet. Her professors were blown away by the lucky discovery.
“The set of circumstances that came together that made this possible is quite unbelievable,” Paul Callo, a biology professor at Mary Baldwin University who was co-leading the trip, said in the statement. “The tide was coming in, so the spear point was soon to be buried.”
When Rolph showed Callo the artifact, he was “truly at a loss for words,” he said. “It is certainly awe-inspiring to see and touch something that was made by human hands thousands of years ago.”
The barrier island where Rolph found the stone point is part of a natural area owned by the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation, which means the artifact is now the property of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Archaeologists collected it from the Mary Baldwin group and have taken it to the Virginia Department of Historic Resources for further study.
Rolph was fine with not keeping the spearpoint. “That’s how you get cursed!” she said.
How much do you know about the first people to reach the Americas? Find out with our First Americans quiz!
