Posted on 12/03/2021 3:32:40 PM PST by MeneMeneTekelUpharsin
Banner stones were mounted on the Atlatyl shaft, not the projectile Dart shaft.
That doesn’t look like any of the flint on my ranch. Should be more glass-like. I’ve never seen a flint artifact with a hole in it. I think that would be very hard to do without breaking the piece. My dad found thousands of arrowheads in his lifetime. Even 2 eagle arrowheads. But he has nothing that resembles that type of stone.
Flint is silica, glassy in nature, exhibiting conchoidal fracture like glass. The wear surfaces of the stone in your photos look grainy, and if so, probably not flint. Maybe it is something similar to flint, namely a weathered stone broken off from the aa (pronounced ah^ah) form of basaltic lava, which is suddenly cooled and might be similar in nature to flint.
Think of what arrowheads look like. They are most always made of flint and have very sharp edges, like broken glass does. they are shaped by carefully breaking off tiny shards of glassy flakes by pressing at a point, with a circular fracture front spreading sort of circularly away from the pressure point where initial deliberately induced breaking occurred to relieve the stress.
Your stone is interesting in that it has a cup with a hole formed at the bottom of it. That was quite likely done by design; to what usage I can't guess at this moment.
I can’t believe it took 39 posts for Fred Flintstone to show up.
LOL!!
You sir are a true tooner.
starter, maybe, if it is hand size. If it is big and heavy , an anchor stone for a boat, maybe.
That doesn’t look like flint. Flint is smooth, chips sharply and is greasy feeling.
Well, may it was a drunkard’s firestarter (the asymmetrical thing).
Lol, could be... :)
I worked in my university’s archaeology lab sorting and labelling stuff from digs, got to go on a few digs myself way back in my college days. It does look like a firestarter, but the asymmetrical thing, and the wear looks more “gentle” like water rather than “sharp” like on a firestarter. Hmm.
Unless it was carved out with flint, I have no idea why it would have flint in the name.
I’ve seen this in a nature documentary. The indentations are created by some small animal (can’t remember which) which smashes nuts or shells open on the stones, which, over long periods of time, wore away the stone. They had tons of video of this being done. Small critters of some sort. Super cool.
Wait. I take that back. It could be a firestarter, after looking more closely, it appears there is some “sharp” wear. The asymmetrical thing appears to be more in the upper area, perhaps from the shape of the overall stone. It may have been a somewhat wobbly firestarter, but ... could be what it is.
Could you take to the archaeology department at your local college and ask them?
This can indeed occur naturally, as people who wade creeks do find similar stones with the culprit still inside the depression doing its work. It looks like a creek stone that had a pebble/cobble in a depression, and over time, with water running steadily over it making the pebble/cobble wobble around in the depression, gradually abrading the surface of the depression as well as the surface of the pebble/cobble. As a result, the depression was at first enlarged as the pebble/cobble became smaller. At some point the little cobble got small and light enough that the hole it was grinding in the depression also became smaller in diameter as it got deeper. The little stone eventually bore all the way through. That isn’t to say a person who needed a mortar or more likely a butting stone wouldn’t find such a stone useful too, and picked it up to take it to their shelter to use in food prep. It just looks like a naturally holed rock more than it does the mortars I have seen. Mortars usually have regular shaped depressions, but this has a very irregular shaped depression. Nutting stones can be more irregular since the depression is just used to hold the nut, not to grind them.
It is flint. If you could look at it up close, you can see why it is flint. If broke off a piece, you’d see it right away.
It is 5 3/8” by 4 1/2” and the hole is 5/8”. Hand size...hmmm...
Flint (chert) occurs in limestone.
This does not look even remotely like a bannerstone.
Banner stones (as opposed to other types of nonperforated atlatl weights such as are seen out in the Southwest) were used in Eastern North America where whitetail deer in heavy cover (as opposed to the more open country of mule deer) were the choice prey, and not so much to make the spear go deeper or more forcefully as to steady the throwing arm of the hunter as he waited in position to make the throw. There has been a very good study of this benefit of the bannerstone conducted by live measured experiments in the St. Louis area. The weight of the stone steadied the atlatl-bearing arm and dramatically reduced strain and muscle tremor, enabling the throwers to remain comfortably in position quite a long time before the deer could spot them. This was very practical for white tails in their forested habitat, which would be alerted to anyone trying to get their atlatl in position to throw after spotting the deer.
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