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I hit 10,000 arrowheads cataloged and it proves the typology system needs work
After sorting through a private collection from a site in central Texas, I found that over 600 of the points people call 'Scallorn' are actually just broken Perdizes that were resharpened. We need to rethink how we classify these things instead of sticking to old labels from the 1950s. Anyone else run into this mismatch with local collections?
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nathan2891mo ago
Guess now you'll have to rename half the collection the 'Perdiz Scallorn-ish.'
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michael6931mo ago
The real question nobody is asking is what the original makers would have called these points anyway. Back then they weren't worrying about typologies and clean categories, they just made what worked for the materials they had. Some of those "Perdiz" points probably started as resharpened Scallorns that got shorter and stubbier over time. The whole classification system falls apart once you think about stone quality and how many times a broken tip got reworked. How do we separate a true type from a tool that just got used until it looked like something else?
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