This is one of Hopewell Museum's oldest objects. It is called a LeCroy projectile point. This one is made of a roseate quartz and is probably about 8000 years old.
“The LeCroy blade was named by Madeline Kneberg in 1956 for examples found on the LeCroy Site near the Tennessee River in Hamilton County, TN. The location, itself, was named for the modern finder of this ancient site, Archie LeCroy. The LeCroy is the most famous of the bifurcated blade family but it certainly is not the only one – in fact it is somewhat late in the ancestral line of this artifact type. There have been some successful stratigraphic excavations of bifurcated blades thus giving us chronological evidence of the ages of the various types in this family and how to correctly align their successions. The classification of these blades as bifurcates is because their stems are split or divided on the basal edge – thus bifurcated. These blades are now believed to have been used mostly as knives because their basally notched stems would have been very effective knife hafting areas and because many, if not most, bifurcates have been sharpened and re-sharpened, as cutting tools, down to the short nubby and expended sizes that we generally find today. Many bifurcates have serrated blade edges and it is believed that serrations were used mainly on re-sharpened knives since it would have given the tools saw-tooth sides and greatly increased the cutting abilities. Some, though, most likely would have been used only as dart or small spear points.”
You can learn more about this type of point at http://www.jimmausartifacts.com/to-lecroy-or-not-to-lecroy/.
📸: Ian Burrow