Bridge

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​In 2019, archaeologists with Cultural Resource Analysts excavated part of the Bridge site before it was destroyed by the replacement of the US Highway 60 bridge across the Cumberland River near Smithland​. The site, which is located on a terrace overlooking the Cumberland River, represents the remains of a seasonally occupied Early Archaic (8000-6000 BC) camp. 

Stone tools recovered from the site included spear​points and endscrapers. Ancient Native people used spearpoints to hunt deer and other animals, and for processing fish. They used the endscrapers to process hides and work bone.  ​

Making Blanks/Preforms

​Flintknapping is the process of making a chipped stone tool, like a spearpoint, endscraper, or drill. It begins when a knapper uses a hammer stone to knock the cortex off a chert nodule. This exposes the chert inside. The knapper continues to remove flakes from the nodule to roughly shape a biface/preform (a two-sided blank).  

To make a finer tool, such as a spearpoint, a flintknapper uses softer bone tools to remove smaller flakes from the biface/preform's edges. It is also how a knapper makes notches. These features enable toolmakers to attach or haft a Kirk Corner Notched point to a spear shaft.

​Archaeologists estimated that Native flintknappers at the Bridge site made 170 bifaces/preforms from high-quality cherts. But they refined no more than 30 into spearpoints and endscrapers.​ Why the difference?

Archaeologists think that the ancient flintknappers made bifaces/preforms at the Bridge site because they were easy to transport to places where high-quality cherts were not available. Later, they could shape them into spearpoints or scrapers. They also may have exchanged bifaces/preforms with other groups for food or ​other resources they did not have access to, such as marine shell.