Lab News

Archaeology Lab Program Participants Make Stone Tools

Experiments Lead to Better Understanding of Tool Manufacture and Use

April 30, 2010

Stone artifacts—tools and the debris that resulted from their manufacture—are common at ancestral Pueblo habitation sites, but with the possible exception of projectile points, Southwestern archaeologists have tended to gloss over these artifacts in their studies. During Crow Canyon's 2009 Archaeology Lab Program, participants and Crow Canyon staff worked together on a number of experiments and analyses designed to help us better understand how ancestral Pueblo people made and used stone tools.

Archaeology Lab Program participants make peckingstones by battering cores against sandstone.

We focused on four artifact types. Hammerstones are roundish, hard, and tough rocks with small pits on their ends. Cores are rocks with multiple scars marking where flakes were removed from the surface. Peckingstones are cores on which the sharp edges between flake scars have been battered as the result of being struck against other rocks. Finally, manos are hand-held stones that have been pecked and ground to shape. These artifact types are relatively easy to identify, but we still have much to learn about their uses.

To better understand how ancestral Pueblo people created and used these artifacts, we first made cores from Morrison silicified sandstone, a material that is commonly found in archaeological sites and is abundant in local canyons. During this experiment, we recognized that a much harder stone, such as a river cobble or hunk of quartzite, was necessary to remove flakes from, and produce sharp edges on, a piece of Morrison silicified sandstone. Thus, it was unlikely that ancestral Pueblo people could have made cores by striking two pieces of the same material together. Instead, it appears that the artifacts we call hammerstones were used to create cores.

Our second experiment investigated how peckingstones were created. We used the cores we had just made to peck and batter many different items that ancestral Pueblo people modified, including timber, hides, animal bones, and pieces of sandstone. On the basis of this experiment, we found that the edges of peckingstones dulled and blunted very easily when struck against sandstone, but not when modifying other materials.

These manos from Goodman Point Pueblo were also used as hammerstones, as evidenced by the damage on their ends.

Through these experiments, we determined that peckingstones were almost certainly made by battering cores against sandstone, presumably to shape building stones or to shape and sharpen corn-grinding tools, including manos. What we can't tell yet is how often peckingstones were used for each activity. This is an important question because these activities reflect completely different aspects of the ancestral Pueblo economy: the shaping of building stone relates to new construction, whereas the shaping and sharpening of corn-grinding tools relates to food preparation. So it would be really useful if we could distinguish when a peckingstone was used for each activity.

We don't really have an answer to this question yet, but our hunch is that most peckingstones were used for food preparation rather than for construction. We think this for two reasons. First, building stones were shaped only once and were often reused, whereas corn-grinding tools needed continuous sharpening. Second, peckingstones are just as common at the Duckfoot site, where the architecture did not include pecked-block masonry, as they are at later sites where pecked-block masonry was present. If our hunch is right, and corn grinding was a women’s activity in the past as it is today, then it implies that cores, peckingstones, manos, and metates were all made and used primarily by women. This is a striking thought because, in many parts of the world, archaeologists have tended to assume that stone artifacts reflect men's activities. Even if projectile points were made and used by men, our studies make a strong case that most of the stone artifacts we find in ancestral Pueblo sites reflect the activities of ancestral Pueblo women. This realization opens up many new opportunities for research on gender and the sexual division of labor in ancestral Pueblo society.