The team filters soil from the site to find small flakes of stone.
"At first we found a few dozen artifacts. Most were quartz debitage," Parsons said, referring to stone fragments shed during tool making.
Continued excavation revealed thousands of quartz fragments and a prize quartzite projectile point in pristine condition.
The features of the artifacts and the soil depth at which they were found suggest their age, as ancient peoples in the Northeast produced points with distinctive shapes at different times.
The West Rock points resemble a quartz type common in southern New England known as "Squibnocket triangles," although more intact points are needed to confirm the style. They are known to date from 4,800 to 3,600 years ago.
Rogers says the point makers were probably hunter-gatherers, perhaps living in a seasonal hunting camp.
Imperfect Points
"Quartz was probably not their first choice" for making stone points, he said. Although very hard, quartz cracks unpredictably and is difficult to work. The hunter-gathers probably selected fist-sized lumps of quartz and broke them into two parts. The ancient craftspeople then used rocks to shape the quartz, Rogers says.
Once the quartz gained a sufficiently triangular shape, pieces of wood or antler were then pressed against the edges to flake off small pieces to shape the final product.
Parsons says she wondered why the site contained so many imperfect points. The answer is probably that the "good" points were used for hunting, while less-than-perfect pieces were discarded, she says.
State of Connecticut archeologist Nicholas Bellantoni, of the University of Connecticut, says similar sites probably dot Connecticut. Settlement sites would be close to water and well-drained land—the same features that led European settlers to found their cities at these locations.
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