Part
of our goal here at the Natick Historical Society is to collect anything and
everything related to Natick’s past. Doing this allows us to better to tell every
individual part of Natick’s story. These objects can vary pretty significantly.
One particular collection that we have been working with quite a bit recently
is our collection of stone tools, most of them made by native people from the
Natick region thousands of years ago.
Though
the town of Natick was founded in 1651, people had been living in this area for
thousands of years before that. While we have little evidence of any major
permanent settlement in most of Natick prior to the 1600s, archaeological
evidence left behind can tell us quite a bit about the lives of the people who
were living in what would day become Natick.
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| A Selection of Some of the Projectile Points |
Objects
from the early years of Natick’s founding are relatively rare. We can consider
ourselves lucky to have as many objects as we do from the early years of a
human presence in this area. The majority of these objects are stone tools,
which survive for a variety of reasons. These tools can be dated as far back as 8,000 to 5,000 years ago to the Archaic period, though we have a few pieces from the more recent Woodland Period (3,000 to 2,500 years ago). Native people would have used a variety
of different tools in their daily lives, not just stone tools however the stone
tools and lithics are generally the only objects that survive. Stone is obviously
much less likely to be broken or discarded than other materials and it’s
significantly more long lasting. In temperate or wetter climates organic
material deteriorates more easily overtime and we are left with very few
wooded, reed or cloth materials from the distant past.
The
majority of our stone tools are what are referred to by archaeologists as
‘projectile points’. This is a general term used by archaeologists,
anthropologists and historians to refer to sharp, pointed objects that could be
used for a variety of different purposes. Previously we had attempted to define
the uses of individual artifacts more specifically, often just based on size or
general appearance and while styles; materials and certain general statements
can always be made about projectile points, knowing their exact purpose is
quite challenging to us today. This is one of the reasons that the term ‘arrowhead’
is rarely used by archaeologists today. Stone tools would usually be used with
some element that was made of wood, fiber or another organic material which
would have decomposed over time. Without these pieces of archaeological context
it can be very difficult to classify exactly how these objects would have been
used. Though they were obviously used for cutting, piercing or similar activities
the exact usage is difficult to state with certainty and thus the more general
term of ‘projectile point’ fits better. These
objects were likely used for a variety of purposes including, but not limited to
arrowheads, spearheads, darts, scissors, knives and scraping tools.
Most
projectile points in our collection come from locally available stones like
quartz or felsite. There are a few examples of objects found in Natick made of
non-locally occurring stones which may have arrived here through various trade
routes that existed between native communities of Algonquin speaking peoples
along the East Coast.
Despite
their seeming simplicity creating lithics like these took a high degree of
skill to manufacture. Chiseling stone into very specific shapes, which would be
almost identical in each manufactured piece, took years of training in skills
that would have been passed down between generations.
Not
all the stone tools in our collection meet these descriptions of course. We
have a number of other sorts of stone tools that were used by indigenous people
living in the Natick area including hand axes, chisels, fishing sinkers and mortars
and pestles. As is the case with our projectile points it can sometimes be
difficult to determine the use of these artifacts without the natural materials
that would have been used to use them.
