Angostura

Examples from Burke County, Georgia

NAME: This point type was first described by Jack Hughes in 1949 while investigating areas in western South Dakota and northeastern Wyoming, sighting examples he referred to as Long points from the Long site in Angostura Reservoir, South Dakota for which the type is named. The South Dakota examples sighted by Hughes were followed by examples from Texas that were illustrated by Dee Ann Suhm, Alex Krieger and Edward Jelks (1954) including several beveled examples. James Cambron and David C. Hulse reported examples from Cambron site 116 in Limestone County, Alabama and from the lower levels at the Stanfield-Worley Bluff Shelter site (1964). Wormington (1957) reported one example from the Santa Isabel Iztapan site in Mexico. Other examples are known from the Tennessee Valley.

AGE: Shum, Krieger and Jelks estimated their Texas examples to date between 6000 and 4000 B.C. Finding examples at the lower levels of the Stanfield-Worley site and those examples from the Tennessee Valley led Cambron and Hulse to conclude that the blades dated to the Late Paleo or Early Archaic periods. Rodney Peck wrote about an early Hardaway variant he called the Haw River point. Joffre L. Coe (1964) had identified this variant at the Morrow Mountain site in North Carolina as the earliest member of the Hardaway group of points. Peck estimated the type to date to 12,000 B.P, believing it to be part of the pre-Clovis culture. The Santa Isabel Iztapan, Mexico example was found in association with mastodon remains and a pointed-base Lerma point and a bi-face knife, believed to be a transitional Paleo type.

DESCRIPTION: The Angostura is a medium to large point. Cambron and Soday examined 12 examples from nine Tennessee Valley sites that measured between 101mm (from the Quad site) and 54mm (from Meigs County, Tennessee) with an average length of 76mm and 28mm in width. The cross-section is bi-convex and the blade edge is convex with a slight shoulder at the terminal end of the hafting area. Flaking is broad and random, but may approach crude collateral flaking. Some of the western examples had fine, oblique transverse flaking. Random flaking is dominant. Blades are finished with some secondary percussion flaking with some fine retouch pressure flaking to remove irregular edges. Several of the Tennessee examples were beveled on one edge of each face, as were the Texas examples and perhaps the North Carolina Haw River examples as well, but this trait was not evident on the South Dakota examples.Resharpening techniques are often a local application rather than a diagnostic trait of a type. Cambron and Hulse described most examples as having “auriculated bases with contracted, pointed, or rounded basal edges.” Their comment seems to relate to the basal corners as they describe the distinguishing characteristic as an “incurvate” base that may at times be straight or slightly excurvate. The base is basally thinned and is usually smoothed.

DISTRIBUTION: Angostura points and perhaps other extremely similar points of the same age seem to be distributed from Central America through the Midwestern states and east to at least Tennessee, Alabama and North Carolina.

Information for this article was derived from James W. Cambron and David C. Hulse, Handbook of Alabama Archaeology, Alabama Archaeological Society