Student hunting shark teeth finds a 4,500-year-old spearpoint
A biology student combing a Virginia beach for shark teeth picked up a six-inch stone spearpoint that archaeologists date to about 4,500 years ago.
Brooklyn Rolph was walking a Virginia beach with her eyes on the sand, hoping for a shark tooth. What she picked up instead was a stone spearpoint that archaeologists say is roughly 4,500 years old — an object shaped by human hands thousands of years ago, not by a fish.
The stone in her hand was six inches long
The find is about 6 inches (15 centimeters) long. Local archaeologists identified it as a type known as a Lehigh/Koens-Crispin point, a style of stone tool made by Indigenous people across the East Coast of what is now the United States from around 4,500 to 3,000 years ago. Points of this kind are sometimes called a "broadspear." The same stone may also have served as a knife for prehistoric hunter-gatherers living in the Late Archaic period.
That makes it a working tool rather than a decoration: something carried, used and eventually lost or left behind on ground that is now a beach. Rolph, a biology undergraduate at Mary Baldwin University in Virginia, recognised it as a point straight away. She had already been scanning for pointy objects underwater, and when she saw the stone she alerted the professors running the trip.
The tide was minutes away from burying it
The discovery came on Sept. 21, the last day of the excursion, just after a lunch break. Rolph had set out to quickly explore a mound of shells on the island and spotted the spearpoint at the edge of an inlet.
Paul Callo, a biology professor at Mary Baldwin University who co-led the trip, said the timing was almost absurd. "The set of circumstances that came together that made this possible is quite unbelievable," he said in a statement. "The tide was coming in, so the spear point was soon to be buried." A few more minutes of walking, a slightly later lunch, and the sea would have taken it.
The trip was meant for plants and animals
Nobody on the trip was digging for archaeology. It was an ecology course, and the faculty had secured a permit from the state to explore the barrier islands off Virginia's Eastern Shore. That shoreline is the southern part of the Delmarva Peninsula, which includes most of Delaware and parts of Virginia and Maryland. The island where the point turned up is part of a natural area owned by the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation.
The students were there to study the plants and animals of the coastal ecosystem. Rolph's find was a piece of human history sitting on top of it. "They were ecstatic," she recalled of her professors' reaction. Callo said that when she showed him the artifact he was "truly at a loss for words," adding: "It is certainly awe-inspiring to see and touch something that was made by human hands thousands of years ago."