Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T20:15:06.560Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Glazed Polish on Flint Tools

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

John Witthoft
John Witthoft*
Affiliation:
The University Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Laboratory and experimental studies of glazed polish (corn gloss) on sickle edges, trillo teeth, hoe blades, and mealing stones indicate that this polish is analogous to modern lapidary polishes which are produced as submicroscopic frictional fusion zones by rubbing with soft powders. Frictional contact with opaline inclusions in grasses has produced corn gloss by fusion of flint surfaces and by fusion to them of dehydrated molecules of opal. The one-to-one equation of corn gloss to grasses has many implications to culture history. Among others, a previously unsuspected type of intense agriculture, closely adapted to conservation of prairie soils, is indicated for Hopewell, Middle Mississippi, and other American Indian cultures.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , July 1967 , pp. 383 - 388
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1967

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References Cited

Crawford, O. G. S. 1930 A Primitive Threshing-Machine. Antiquity, Vol. 4, No. 16, pp. 335–9. Gloucester.Google Scholar
Curwen, E. Cecil 1930 Prehistoric Flint Sickles. Antiquity, Vol. 4, No. 14, pp. 182–6. Gloucester.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Curwen, E. Cecil 1935 Agriculture and the Flint Sickle in Palestine. Antiquity, Vol. 9, No. 33, pp. 62–8. Gloucester.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Curwen, E. Cecil 1937 Tribulum-Flint from Sussex. Antiquity, Vol. 11, No. 41, pp. 93–4. Gloucester.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Curwen, E. Cecil and Hatt, Gutmund 1953 Plow and Pasture: The Early History of Farming. Henry Schuman, New York.Google Scholar
Griffin, James B. 1952 A Preview of the Ceramic Relationships of the Snyders Site, Calhoun County, Illinois. In The Snyders Site: Calhoun County, Ill., by W. L. Wadlow, Gregory Perino, William Fecht, and James B. Griffirj, pp. 14–21. The Greater St. Louis Archaeological Society, St. Louis.Google Scholar
Heizer, Robert F. and Cook, Sherburne F. (Editors) 1960 The Application of Quantitative Methods in Archaeology. Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology, New York.Google Scholar
Kraemer, Henry 1907 A Textbook of Botany and Pharmacognoscy. Lippincott, Philadelphia and London.Google Scholar
Moorehead, Warren King 1910 The Stone Age in North America. 2 Vols. Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York.Google Scholar
Seminov, S. A. 1964 Prehistoric Technology, translated by M. W. Thompson. Cory, Adams, and Mackay, London.Google Scholar
Smith, Arthur George 1953 Waterworn Artifacts from Late Pleistocene Lake Beaches in Northern Ohio. American Antiquity, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 156–7. Menasha.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Speck, Frank G. 1940 Penobscot Man. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.Google Scholar
Steensberg, Axel 1943 Ancient Harvesting Implements. Nationalmuseets Skifter Archaeologisk-Historisk Raeke, Vol. 1. København.Google Scholar
Watts, May Thielgaard 1957 Reading the Landscape: An Adventure in Ecology. MacMillan and Company, New York.Google Scholar
White, Anta M. 1963 Analytical Description of the Chipped-Stone Industry from Snyders Site, Calhoun County, Illinois. Anthropological Papers 19, pp. 1–70. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.Google Scholar
Witthoft, John 1955 Worn Stone Tools from Southeastern Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania Archaeologist, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 16–25. Milton.Google Scholar