6 Archaic to Woodland Stone Tools - Nutting Stones, Axe Heads, Grinder

Native American, Archaic to Woodland period. A compact assembly of six ground and pecked stone implements, each shaped by patient abrasion rather than flaking. The group comprises two nutting stones with cupped depressions worn into their faces, two axe heads (one encircled by a haft groove, the other a tapered celt in dark green stone with a polished bit), a grinding stone of vaguely mushroom form, and a discoidal, flat on one face and gently domed on the reverse, where a lightly incised radiating pattern survives. Hard-stone tools of this kind served the daily economy of eastern North American foragers and early horticulturalists: cracking nuts, processing pigment and seed, felling and dressing timber. The discoidal likely carried a different weight, gaming stones and chunkey-type discs having social and ritual dimensions beyond mere utility. Nutting stones (also called cupstones or pitted stones) rank among the most abundant artifacts of the eastern Archaic, their conical hollows produced either by repeatedly seating hickory nuts and walnuts for cracking or, in some interpretations, by use as bearing blocks for fire or bow drills. Grooved axes appear in the Middle and Late Archaic and were bound to wooden hafts with hide and sinew; the ungrooved celt, in contrast, becomes dominant in the Woodland and later periods, wedged directly into a socketed handle. Discoidals occupy a category of their own. Well-finished stone discs with concave, flat, or domed faces are associated across the Southeast and Midwest with chunkey, a hoop-and-pole game in which players hurled spears toward a rolling stone. Incised decoration on such discs is comparatively uncommon and raises the possibility of an ownership mark or a personal device. Item # 200196

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