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Green Clovis quartz crystal point. Credit: Briggs Buchanan
Quartz crystals are difficult to knap due to size, hardness, and crystalline structure, making them a "low-quality" raw material. However, the Clovis people of North America sometimes made points and other tools from this material despite its drawbacks. To determine whether the quartz crystal points of the Clovis were functionally comparable to those made from higher-quality toolstones, Dr. Briggs Buchanan and his colleagues conducted scaling and geometric morphometric analyses on Clovis crystal points. The study is published in Lithic Technology.
The properties of quartz
The Clovis are the best-documented late Pleistocene hunter-gatherer group of northern America. They are known for creating stone tools from high-quality raw materials, including chert, obsidian, and rhyolite, due to their tendency to be homogeneous, fracture predictably, and be free of impurities.
By comparison, low-quality, coarse-grained, heterogeneous materials such as siltstones, quartzites, and silicified stones are generally less used due to their difficulty to knap.
However, quartz crystals have different properties from most quartzites, being generally fine-grained and often fracturing conchoidally, yet they are still difficult to knap due to their internal crystalline structure. Additionally, quartz crystal source locations are limited, further constraining the practicality of using this raw material for stone tool production.
Determining whether these properties made Clovis points significantly different in either their size or shape from other Clovis points, may suggest that the use of quartz crystals as a raw material limited the functional capabilities of these points.
Analyzing the quartz crystal points
The study analyzed 58 quartz crystal Clovis points gathered from published research papers and the Paleoindian Database of the Americas; of these, 33 were suitable for geometric morphometric analysis, while 56 had linear measurements suitable for scaling analysis.
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