YOUNG: I enjoy collections from everywhere

May 23, 2009 08:19 pm

— From time to time, people will bring part or all of their artifacts to me to either look at or identify. Needless to say, I always enjoy looking at new pieces regardless of where they were originally found. The more I can view, the better understanding I may have for a specific type found within a certain area. Plus there is always the chance someone may find a new type not previously reported. However, the general rules for reporting a new type require the person naming the new type to have at least 100 examples of this new type. The odds of someone finding a single site where this many new examples might be found is astronomical. Usually this newly discovered type is reported to come from a number of sites and in many cases the sites are miles apart. One example of this is a projectile dart point now referred to as an Axtell point. The town of Axtell is located southeast of Waco a few miles south of State Highway 31. This point was named by Frank Bryan around 1938 but because the outline was very similar to another point known as the Palmillas, archeologists decided to discontinue Mr. Bryan’s description and in turn any point which had a rounded stem was called Palmillas. About 15 years ago, Elton Pruitt, a professional archeologist, and C.K. Chandler, an avocationalist, decided Mr. Bryan’s original description of an Axtell point was correct and should be set aside and separated from the later Palmillas type. There were several reasons they decided we needed to have a separate name for a dart point which had a rounded stem but differed from the typical Palmillas and the distribution for each type was not the same. The later style Palmillas has been reported from many sites all over Texas while the Axtell’s distribution seemed to center around Bell County and extending eastward into the Piney Woods of East Texas. The general outline of most typical Palmillas points were fairly thin with a stem which was rounded near the base. On the other hand, the Axtell is wider and the rounding of the stem starts at the base of the blade which in turn makes the typical stem on an Axtell point look almost like a coin. In fact collectors from Central Texas commonly refer to the Axtell as a “penny point” because of the stem shape. Also, another characteristic feature of the Axtell point which separates it from a Palmillas is the fact stem grinding is typically present on Axtell and absent on the Palmillas. Since grinding is a trait commonly found on older dart points we can say with some certainty Axtell points date to the Middle Archaic even though we don’t have any established dates for this style. On the other hand, Palmillas points have been dated to the Late Archaic.
In the past few months I have been privileged to see several nice collections held in private hands. It has always been my policy to not say whose collection I have viewed nor where the collections come from. That information is between the owner of the material and myself. And if someone wants me to look at their material but they would prefer to keep the location to themselves, I don’t have a problem with this. The one thing which I will continually ask of collectors is for them to either mark on each artifact where it came from or keep all pieces from a single site contained in a box or container. I personally recommend marking each piece but this takes more time and should be done with the proper material. Archeologists use India ink and mark a specific number which specifies the county where the piece came from and also the recorded site number. An example would be an artifact found on a site known informally as the Bird Point site. This name is a nickname usually assigned to sites where mitigation (excavation work) is planned for the site. The formal number for Bird Point is 41 FT 201. Therefore anything they recovered from the surface of the site would be marked with this number. “41” stands for the state of Texas (we were the 41st state to be admitted into the United States). “FT” is the official abbreviation for Freestone County and “201” means is was the 201st site to be officially recorded in Freestone County. Artifacts found during excavations of the site would also have other numbers tying it back to the unit where it was excavated and another number for the depth. Keep in mind some artifacts are so small it is impossible to put all the correct identification numbers on a piece so these pieces must be kept in separate bags. A much shorter and simpler method of keeping up with where a piece is found is to either start a consecutive numbering system simply starting with one and continuing upward or assign your own number to a site and use the county code and your site number for each piece from the site. An example of this would be NV 1 which would be your first site in Navarro County. One other final thing I need to mention is the number put on an artifact needs to be painted over with clear fingernail polish. This will help to prevent the number from being rubbed off through time.
For those of you who have never viewed the Reading Collection in the Arrowhead Room at Navarro College and you would like to see an exceptionally large collection, call the college and make arrangements to see the material. The collection is estimated to contain approximately 48,000 artifacts and I can personally say there isn’t any way to view all of the material in a single day. I have been there numerous times and on nearly every trip, I see something new which I had not seen before. Mr. Reading wanted to have at least one artifact from each county in Texas, a goal which he did not achieve but he went a long way toward his goal. And he also has a lot of material from New Mexico because he lived in West Texas for a number of years and would venture over the border into the neighboring state. He and his wife spent countless hours cutting out different colored pieces of velveteen and gluing these patterns into shadowbox frames. Then they would wire each artifact into a specific frame which in many cases everything within the frame came from a single site. Inside each glass covered case, they would add a typed notation as to where each piece came from. However, back in the days when they put this collection together, official methods of site recording were known only within the professional community so Mr. Reading’s description of a site is very generalized. For instance if a group of artifacts came from John Brown’s farm on Richland Creek, he did not know to separate each site on John Brown’s farm even though John Brown had 20 sites on his place. Not until the early 1940s did most archeologists separate each site into specific sites.
Next week: More about the Reading Collection
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