Jeff Stafford said:
Thanks for the replies.........I just noticed the rest of the post.
What throws me off the most is I have found many White River points all over N.W.Ark and have never found broken or whole beveled White River points.......................
The are bifacial resharpened every time...............
Maybe some day more,or at least a few will come up there
Those of Mr.Perino's are nice..............and more beveled than I have ever seen..................
Also most of the points here that were unifacial or bifacial resharpened were Lance<Dalton
or Stem<Searcy
So the whole unifacial resharpening for a side-notch point is......................
So very odd to me...........................It's just not something I think about everyday..................
When at the same time.......it is true Calf Creek and Cossatot River went out of the norm and produced Drill before............................so perhaps it is a rare White River?
Beveling is the result of resharpening. It was practiced for conservation, to preserve the cutting edge and allow for many more resharpening than if done bifacially. Whenever you do see a beveled edge it ends all doubts as to it's purpose, it was a knife. The technique traveled throughout North America and like punch notching and other technology it is a prime example of diffusion. Beveling was an ingenius thing and it's always puzzled me how some of the later cultures didn't adapt to it quite as much (not including Harahey variants and a few others).
The funny thing about White River, they seem to be isolated to certain spots. I don't find them on all of the sites I frequent. But, the ones I do find them on, they seem rather abundant. The Ark. River is chalked full of them in certain locations. I have personally found a few in western Arkansas, and have examined some in collections from there. There's a hunter from Bella Vista who has brought several in from a single Archaic site near there. Kill and processing (butcher) sites seem to produce the most, that's to be expected though. There's no doubt that they are morphed from the Dalton points.
You're right, Calf Creek Complex drills are rare as hen's teeth! "Drill" is kind of a misnomer though, most of them simply being knives that were reduced in width at a far greater rate than length. I guess it's all due to the techniques used by the Calf Creek to resharpen. It's all conservation. Have you ever noticed that all of the styles that are commonly beveled, will often end up with the slender "drill-like" blades - Dalton, Dovetail, Kirk, Cobbs, etc? Not all of them are the result of resharpening though, only some...most.
I think around the middle part of Calf Creek complex they started changing their resharpening methods. Have you noticed that some of the earlier ones often have a "torqued" blade, after several resharpening passes? It's kinda like beveling (unifacially), but done to the center. I've noticed this one some Cossattot River as well. I haven't really seen them do it much in the later examples though. It makes a person wonder, I guess that's the most fun part about all of this though! We'll never know all of the answers, but it's a blast trying to figure out what we can.
