The Artifact

How far has this traveled? Who made it?  What were the circumstances that found this spearpoint in a farm field in the Town of Hewett?  What was it used for? Trading, hunting, protection? How old is this?  All questions that flooded through my head as I reached down to pick up and pull out of the wet dirt this oddly symmetrical piece of quartzite.  It stood out on the ground, surrounded by well tumbled stones and thawing dark soil.  How is it that I happened to stop for a second, call a friend and look down to see it just ahead of my boot?  So many questions, so many stories.  One never knows it seems where a simple country walk will lead you or what you'll discover.

(Note: This very well may be pure silica sandstone from Silver Mound, about 15 miles SW of where it was found.   More information follows)
The Hixton quartzite is a sandstone that has been cemented together by silica. Scientists say the sandstone here is different from others. It's pure sand and pure silica, and it's found nowhere else. For 12,000 years, Native Americans have come to Silver Mound to make tools and weapons. The earliest visitors were paleo-Indians who stopped here on their annual North-South migrations to quarry the unique stone they shaped into lance points and later into arrowheads. Archaeologists don't know how they found the hill in the first place, but this was the first place that scientists found evidence of people in what is now Wisconsin.
Steve Boszhardt, a researcher with the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, has said it is known that the stone was used 12,000 years ago - about the time glaciers retreated from Wisconsin as the last Ice Age ended - because people made Clovis points with it. The term refers to the shape of delicate, fluted points up to 8 inches long made by people all over America.
"Through time, the points people made changed shape; the Clovis points were first in America," Boszhardt said.
Oddly, Clovis points seem to have been made for their aesthetics as much as function. "The points are finely worked, well beyond what would be needed to be functional," he said. One reason people returned to Silver Mound may be that its stone "is pretty. It has lots of different colors, from white to blood red. And it's shiny - sparkly. Some think the points were traded like baseball cards," Boszhardt added. Collectors call the small ones bird points, but people hunted mastodons with them.  -Judi Schiller, Richard Schiller