What we know about the people who originally discovered North America is based almost entirely on stone tools and, occasionally, the bones of animals found with those tools. That might seem to provide an extremely limited view of the lives of these ancient American Indians whom archaeologists refer to as Paleo-Indians.

But the variety of uses these tools were put to, and the resulting evidence left in stone and bones, tell archaeologists far more than just what these people ate. Even seemingly mundane activities, such as hunting and butchering animals, can be connected to social and spiritual aspects of their lives in ways that offer remarkable insights into the Paleo-Indian people.

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In a June article in the Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology, Kent State University archaeologist Metin Eren and several of his colleagues describe a collection of stone tools from the Black Diamond site in northeastern Ohio. The site includes artifacts from the Clovis culture, some of the earliest people in North America.

The most unique artifact in the collection looks to be a miniature version of a Clovis spear point. Clovis points are, on average, about 3 1/2 inches long. The Black Diamond miniature point, though similar to other Clovis points in most respects, is less than 1 inch long.

In a 1994 paper in the journal North American Archaeologist, Chris Ellis documented a number of miniature artifacts from the Parkhill Paleo-Indian site in Ontario. He suggested that they could be children’s toys or some kind of ceremonial artifact.

There are suggestions that at least one miniature spear point served a ceremonial function for late Paleo-Indians at the Jones-Miller site in Colorado. At this site of a bison killing, archaeologists found a miniature spear point and a bone whistle near the remnants of a large structure. Ellis noted that large medicine posts, bone whistles, and miniature objects often were associated with the “rituals of shamans in historic times on the Plains” as well as in neighboring regions.

On the other hand, Michael Christopher Guarino and Frederic Sellet, in a study of miniature spear points at another Colorado Paleo-Indian site published in this year's issue of the journal PaleoAmerica, concluded that miniature points were small only because at the time they were made, the tool makers didn’t have access to large quantities of flint, so they were simply making the biggest point they could with the flint available to them.

We don’t have the detailed information about the original context of the Black Diamond miniature Clovis point that might help us to determine what it meant to the Paleo-Indians who made it, but such discoveries may be a window into aspects of the ways of life of these earliest Americans that we don’t often get to explore.

Brad Lepper is curator of archaeology at the Ohio History Connection.

blepper@ohiohistory.org