Anthropologists now recognize two chief varieties of Eden points. One of these is beautifully patterned by long, parallel pressure flakes that cross the blade obliquely on a low diagonal. In the other, parallel flakes meet on a center line. The base and lower edges are usually ground. There is often a single or a double shoulder for hafting. Many anthropologists list another type, the Scottsbluff; it is flaked like the Eden, but shorter and wider, and it has a definite stem with right-angle notches.
THE FINEST FLINT WORK OF EARLY MAN
Two varieties of Folsom and Eden points, and the Plainview type, which has been called unfluted Folsom or Yuma-like. The Plainview was found in Texas. (Upper left, after a cast from the Laboratory of Anthropology, Santa Fe, New Mexico; upper right, after Wormington, 1944; the Eden point, after Howard, 1935; the Plainview, after Krieger, 1947; the second Eden, after Wormington, 1944.)
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.)
