The Plainview Point
Another type of early point has given students a good deal of trouble. It is shaped somewhat like a Folsom but it has no long chip, or flute, removed from its two faces. The lower edges are often ground. Its surface is sometimes chipped like an Eden with collateral flaking, and sometimes patterned with larger, and less regular flakes. When such points were found with Folsoms, they were often called Folsom-like. As the result of the discovery in 1945 by Glen L. Evans and Grayson E. Meade of eighteen whole or broken points of this sort near Plainview, Texas, in association with numerous fossils of extinct bison, there is a tendency to give these “Unfluted Folsoms” the label Plainview.[25] Like the Folsoms, Plainview points can now be recognized among artifacts collected before their recognition as a distinct type. F. G. Rainey and Frank Hibben have found them in the frozen muck of central Alaska, identifying them by the older names of Yuma-like (Eden) or Generalized Folsom.[26] This muck is an extraordinary formation four to one hundred feet deep. Packed into it are masses of dismembered skeletons of the mammoth, a jaguar, and other extinct mammals, accompanied here and there by ligaments of flesh and hair. Hibben picked up a point in a curio store at Ketchikan on the southern coast of Alaska, and another from Chinitna Bay on the shore of Cook Inlet, both of which he called Yuma-like, but which may now be regarded as very much like Plainviews. Alex Krieger lists as Plainviews a considerable number of points which have been hitherto identified as Clovis or Eden at sixteen different sites[27] (see illustration, [page 155]).
Krieger suggests that Plainview lies between Folsom and Eden in its type of flint work. Later excavations may prove that the three points have a similar historical relationship, and may throw more light on some nine or ten other types of points that early man seems to have made.[28]
Two points that resemble somewhat the Plainview type, and may indeed be merely deviations from it. The one at the left was found by a fisherman at Chinitna Bay, Alaska, and called by Hibben Yuma-like. The other was discovered by Jenks at Browns Valley, Minnesota, associated with a human skeleton. (Left, measurements not available, after Hibben, 1943; right, about natural size, after Roberts, 1940.)
FLINT KNAPPING OF THE OLD AND NEW STONE AGES
From 5,000 to 10,000 years separate the Solutrean artifact of the Paleolithic period from the Neolithic work of Denmark and Egypt, depending on which time scale you accept. The Eden point may have been made 7,000 years ago or even nearer the Neolithic. (The Eden, after Howard, 1935; the Solutrean, after Sollas, 1911; the Danish, after Plant, 1942; the Egyptian, after De Morgan, 1925.)
Besides Clovis, Eden, and Plainview, Alaska has provided cores that Nelson finds “identical in several respects with thousands of specimens found in the Gobi Desert.” He recognizes them as evidence of migration from Asia 9,000 to 12,000 years ago.[29]
A Gypsum Cave point. (After Roberts, 1940.)