Water-screening 
The crew, working during a rare moment of dryness.Everyone in the crew will keep their collective fingers crossed that things start to dry out soon. Despite the rain, progress is still being made.
An interesting note: Jessica, one of the students on the dig, discovered that one of the larger lithic pieces so far recovered from this season may in fact be a broken prismatic blade - a type common to this area during the Woodland Period. Here is an image of the blade in question:
An interesting note: Jessica, one of the students on the dig, discovered that one of the larger lithic pieces so far recovered from this season may in fact be a broken prismatic blade - a type common to this area during the Woodland Period. Here is an image of the blade in question:
hmm im not sure if that's a prismatic blade, it looks more like a weird flake driven off of the corner of a chert cobble. The shape just doesn't seem right
ReplyDeleteThis is a lateral view, so it does look odd. I have done extensive work with Mesoamerican prismatic blade production, so I've seen the good and the bad. This one has a faceted platform and feather termination and is relatively early in the core reduction sequence, though not a primary blade (no cortex). It is highly similar in size and morphology to the prismatic blades of North Carolina and the Ohio Valley.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to tell from the angle of the photograph, but from the size of this blade it looks much more like the Paleoindian tools found at sites like Topper, Gault, 40BN190, etc. than the typical Woodland microblades. Doug Sain at Eastern New Mexico University is working on a thesis about the blades from Topper & might be worth contacting about this piece.
ReplyDelete