Palmer
Defining Attributes
The Palmer is a small, thin, corner-notched point with pronounced serrations and a straight or slightly convex ground base.
Chronology
The Palmer Corner Notched point dates to the Early Archaic period. Gardner (1989) places the Palmer in his Early Archaic Phase I, 10,000 to 9300 BP (approximately 9500-8600 BC in calendar years), and nine radiocarbon dates associated with type from the Brook Run site in Virginia are between 10,030 and 9390 BP (Voigt 2004). Egloff and McAvoy (1990) place the Palmer point between 9600 and 9200 BP (9000-8400 BC) along Virginia’s Nottoway River. Justice (1987) puts Palmer in the Kirk Corner Notched Cluster dated 9500 to 8900 BP (8800-8100 BC). Steponaitis (1980) assigns an Early Archaic I date of 9500 to 9200 BP (8800-8400 BC) to Palmer points. At the St. Albans site in West Virginia, Broyles (1971) radiocarbon dated the small variety of the Kirk Corner Notched – which some consider to be the same as Palmer – to 6980 ± 160 BC (approximately 8250 BC in calendar years). In the Northeast, there are some radiocarbon dates suggesting that many Early Archaic point types are as much as 1500-2000 years younger than their equivalents in the Southeast (Funk 1993; Kent 1996).
Description
Blade
The blade is small and triangular. The sides are usually straight, but occasionally rounded or concave. Most specimens are serrated, some quite deeply.
Haft Element
The base is straight and usually exhibits grinding.
Size
Length ranges from 28 to 60 mm, with an average of 35 mm. Width ranges from 15 to 25 mm, with an average of 20 mm. Thickness ranges from 5 to 12 mm, with an average of 8 mm.
Technique of Manufacture
The Palmer was made through bifacial pressure flaking. Parallel flaking patterns are common, often restricted to one face. Occasionally, tear-drop preforms are found.
Material
In the area surrounding Zekiah Swamp on the lower Potomac, Wanser (1982) found that 41% of 34 Palmer Corner Notched points were quartzite, with 35% quartz, 21% chert, and 3% other material. Steponaitis (1980) also found a sharp preference for quartzite in the lower Patuxent River drainage, followed by quartz and rhyolite, but the sample was only nine points. Stewart (1980) reported that 92% of 12 Palmers in the Hagerstown Valley were chert or jasper, while 8% were rhyolite. Chert Palmer points predominate in the middle Potomac River Valley, but other local materials are also used (Hranicky 2002). In Western Maryland, local and non-local chert and jasper are commonly used, along with siltstone (Wall 1992). In Delaware, most Palmer points are chert or jasper (Custer 1996).
Discussion
The Palmer is distributed across much of the eastern United States (Justice 1987).
Separating Palmer from the Kirk Corner Notched can be problematic (Ward and Davis 1999). Coe (1964) suggests that the Kirk Corner Notched evolved out of the smaller Palmer. Broyles (1971) describes two varieties of the Kirk – an earlier small type and a later large one – and some researchers feel the small variety is the same as the Palmer, without the basal grinding (Justice 1987). Broyles (1971) notes that her large variety – the “classic” Kirk Corner Notched – sometimes has light basal grinding. Even at the Hardaway site, nearly half of the Kirk Corner Notched points exhibited some degree of basal grinding (Daniel 1998). Because there is some overlap both chronologically and morphologically (including degree of basal grinding) between the Palmer and Kirk corner notched types, Custer (1996; see also Chapman 1977) suggests it is simpler to combine the two points into one type dated between 10,000 and 9000 BP. Others have stated that Palmers have a tang that is roughly half as long as it is wide (length:width ratio of 0.49), which distinguishes it from more elongated (ratio of 0.65) Kirk tangs (Daniel 1998).
McAvoy and McAvoy (1997) defined an earlier form of Palmer – the Deep Notched Palmer – at sites along the Nottoway River in Virginia. The Deep Notched Palmer is a medium point with deep, narrow notches, a straight-to-excurvate base, and often a serrated blade. At the St. Albans site, Broyles (1971) obtained a radiocarbon date of 7900 ± 500 BC (approximately 9350 BC in calendar years) for a similar point, called Charleston. Benthall (1990) excavated a similar point from the lowest level of the Daugherty Cave site in Virginia, radiocarbon dated to 7840 BC (9300 BC).
A slightly later point, the Decatur, is similar in style to, and possibly derived from, the Palmer point. Like the Palmer, the Decatur is a thin, small-to-medium corner notched point with a straight or concave base, and with heavily ground basal margins and corner notches. At the Cactus Hill site in Virginia, McAvoy and McAvoy (1997) obtained a radiocarbon date of 9140 ± 50 BP (8300 BC) for this type. Although Decatur points are not found in Maryland, they are common in Virginia and to the south.
Defined in Literature
Coe (1964) originally defined the type based on points recovered from the Hardaway site in North Carolina.
Other Names Used
- Kirk Corner Notched (small variety)
References
1990 Daugherty’s Cave: A Stratified Site in Russell County, Virginia. Archeological Society of Virginia Special Publication n. 18.
1971 The St. Albans Site, Kanawha County, West Virginia. West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey, Report of Archeological Investigations 3, Morgantown, WV.
1977 Archaic Period Research in the Lower Little Tennessee River Valley -- 1975: Icehouse Bottom, Harrison Branch, Thirty Acre Island, Calloway Island. University of Tennessee Department of Anthropology, Report of Investigations 18, Knoxville, TN.
1964 The Formative Cultures of the Carolina Piedmont. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 54(5). Philadelphia.
1996 A Guide to Prehistoric Arrowheads and Spear Points of Delaware. Center for Archaeological Research, University of Delaware, Newark.
1998 Hardaway Revisited: Early Archaic Settlement in the Southeast. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.
1990 Chronology of Virginia’s Early and Middle Archaic Periods. Archeological Society of Virginia Special Publication n. 22.
1989 An Examination of Cultural Change in the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene (circa 9200 to 6800 B.C.). In Paleoindian Research in Virginia: A Synthesis, edited by J. Mark Wittkofski and Theodore R. Reinhart, pp. 5–51. Special Publication 19. Archeological Society of Virginia, Richmond.
2002 Lithic Technology in the Middle Potomac River Valley of Maryland and Virginia. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York.
2007 The Early and Early Middle Archaic Period Occupations at the Confluence of the Little Kanawha and Ohio Rivers, Parkersburg, West Virginia. Paper presented at the 64 Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, Knoxville, Tennessee.
1987 Stone Age Spear and Arrow Points of the Midcontinental and Eastern United States: A Modern Survey and Reference. Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
1997 Archaeological Investigations of Site 44SX202, Cactus Hill, Sussex County. Virginia Department of Historic Resources Research Report Series n. 8, Richmond.
1980 A Survey of Artifact Collections from the Patuxent River Drainage, Maryland. Maryland Historical Trust Monograph Series 1. Maryland Historical Trust and Maryland Department of Natural Resources, Annapolis, MD.
1980 Prehistoric Settlement and Subsistence Patterns and the Testing of Predictive Site Location Models in the Great Valley of Maryland. Ph.D. dissertation, Catholic University of America.
2004 Archaeological Data Recovery at the Brook Run Jasper Quarry (Site 44CU122), Associated with the Proposed Route 3 Improvements, Culpeper County, Virginia. Report prepared for the Virginia Department of Transportation by the Louis Berger Group.
1992 Lithic Resource Utilization in Western Maryland Prehistory. Journal of Middle Atlantic Archaeology 8:1-10.
1982 A Survey of Artifact Collections from Central Southern Maryland. Maryland Historical Trust Manuscript Series 23. Maryland Historical Trust and Maryland Department of Natural Resources, Annapolis.
1999 Time Before History: The Archaeology of North Carolina. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.