Not all research is planned. Not all discoveries come about by intent. Sometimes, a person is just in the right place at the right time.
For me, that place was a Kamloops area beach last week, walking with my dogs. The snow and ice had just melted away, revealing a single artifact on the sand: a complete spear point made more than 6 millennia ago.
It’s just a single artifact, but an object with the potential to tell us so much.
This artifact joins a small handful of other local sites known to date to what we call the “early period”, those few thousand years after the last Ice Age when the climate and landscape were shifting and settling into the world we now know. It’s a rare and tantalizing glimpse into a very ancient past.
The object is a distinctive style known as Old Cordilleran, and is typically found in sites dating from about 9,000 to about 6,000 years ago. Functionally, it’s what archaeologists call a “projectile point”, a group of tools that includes the tips of spears, darts, and arrows.
This style is believed to be a spear head, meaning it was attached to the end of a long handle, and used by thrusting, most likely in the hunting of large game. It’s long, blade-like edges could serve double duty as a butchering tool.
When the artifact was made—and lost—the environment here was warmer and drier than today, and the valleys around Kamloops would have been rolling savannah of scattered ponderosa pine and tall grasses, supporting large herds of elk and deer, with mountain sheep, moose and caribou passing through.
The tool is made of a black volcanic stone called dacite, likely sourced from the nearby Arrowstone Hills, where Secwépemc, Nlaka’pamux, St'át'imc and their ancestors have been mining the valuable toolstone since time out of mind.
The artifact is rare—as are most things of that age—but not unexpected. The Kamloops area has been home to more than 500 generations of Secwepemc and their ancestors, and the evidence of their occupation is plentiful here. But a thing can be significant without being surprising.
Artifacts of this age, beauty and completeness are unusual, in part, because of unlawful collection. When people find objects like this, and keep them as collectible curiosities, the information they contain is lost to the rest of us. The archaeological record gets fragmented.
It can be helpful to imagine the archaeological record like an actual book, and artifacts as pages. When a page is removed, the rest of the story is harder to understand. Sometimes we don’t even know what’s missing.
If a collector had picked up this spearhead, taken it home as a prize, this page would be gone, and I wouldn’t have been able to tell you its story.
Collection of artifacts is illegal, and also deeply unethical. That object is part of cultural patrimony that—unless you are an Indigenous person in your home territory—probably doesn’t belong to you.
If you happen upon an artifact, there is a way you can actually contribute to the record. Take a photo, take a waypoint using Google maps (which lets you share a location), or just note your location as carefully as possible, and bring your information to someone that can help record the site.
In Kamloops, the Secwepemc Museum can give direction, as can the BC Archaeology Branch in Victoria. And, as a Dig It reader, you know that our group of local archaeologists are here for you. Reach out and help us help you, and together we’ll learn from and protect the past.