Breakage Patterns on Fishtail Projectile Points: Experimental and Archaeological Cases

Abstract

Fishtail projectile points, also known as Fell 1, are dated between 11,000 and 9,500 14C yr B.P. in South and Central America and have been traditionally considered diagnostic of the early peopling of the continent. In this paper, experimental observations of impact breakage patterns on fishtail projectile point replicas are compared with archaeological points from the Cerro El Sombrero Cima site, in the Argentinian pampas, which exhibit a high breakage ratio and suggest that impact was a major cause of breakage in the assemblage. The position of these fractures is also briefly compared to patterns described by J. Bird (1969) for fishtail projectile points from Ecuador and Southern Chile.

Keywords:

• Impact fractures
• fishtail projectile points
• experiment
• Cerro El Sombrero Cima site

Acknowledgments

Work was funded through grants PICT Bicentenario 2010 No.1517 (Agencia de Promoción Científica y Tecnológica) and PIP 112 -201101-00177 (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas). Agueda Petersen and three anonymous reviewers read and commented on the manuscript and helped to improve this paper. Finally we would like to thank Bruce Bradley, Jim Woods, and the editors of Ethnoarchaeology for their generous reviews and comments which contributed greatly to this paper.