Ceremonial Spear Points?

[greywolf22]

The Edwards Plateau is one of the largest source of chert in the United States. The Edwards limestone formation contains seams, ledges, beds and nodules of high quality chert. For example, on the north side of San Antonio, there are extensive expousers of Edwards chert, often fine grained grey to brown material, and there are many quarry locales where these were procured by ancient people of the region.
Information comes from "A Field Guide to Stone Artifacts of Texas Indians" by Tom R. Hester -and- Ellen Sue Turner. If you are a Texas collector this is a very good book.
This is a Kenny made of Tan Edwards Plateau chert .

This is a Friday made of Grey Edwards Plateau chert.
Jack

[JoeM]

Lots of good info in this post!
Thanks for the history lesson on Brian Reinhardt and his "Gray Ghosts".
I don't care if they are made from slabs, those things are AWESOME!
The obsidian point does kind of jump out as being non-authentic.
I'll have to look it up, but please tell me that pretty little Kenny
is an arrowhead and not something Paleo. :lol:
Thanks, Jack.
Thanks, Roger.
Joe

[greywolf22]

Joe
Kinney is middle archaic 5,000 - 2,0000 BP. It is pre-bow.
Jack

[Lithophylic]

It is my opinion that these are probably no older then 150 years.  At the turn of the century, there was a huge market for indian artifacts, especially on the east coast of the US and in Europe.

[painshill]

Hi
Not trying to revive this post but just wanted to throw this in to the pot as a wrap-up and the server wouldn't let me until now.
In fairness to the original vendor, no claim was made for these items beyond "North American, Ceremonial" and a belief that they had come from the Pitt Rivers collection. In truth, I bought them within a job lot that included a nice group of lithics from Fayem in Egypt which are definitely 'right'. I didn't have much in the way of N American items and the spearheads looked very funky.
Natch, I hoped I'd found something interesting (well, in a way I have), but given what I paid for the lot, I don't feel in the slightest bit aggrieved. Even as 'modern' they make splendid display pieces and are a remarkable testmanent to whoever made them.
Regarding the Pitt Rivers connection, I felt they were unlikely to be from the main collection and the PR museum kindly confirmed that none of this has been sold off. They did however confirm that PR retained a private collection in his own museum which was ultimately broken up in the 1950's and then progressively sold off. PR's habit was to label the actual items in his collection with Indian ink but items added after his death in 1900 may not have this (these don't). So, if they are PR items they are "from the collection of" rather than personally "collected by" and couldn't have been added later than the 1950's. They might well have been "newly-made" at the time.
PR was an interesting, eclectic guy. During his army career from 1850 onwards he collected items from everywhere he was posted to or visited (and was given a lot of stuff by people who knew of his interest in anthropology). He changed the shape of thinking for museums with his belief that it was more informative to group items according to usage rather than origin or age. One part of his museum was just 'hats' for example. He also took the view that it was just as important to preserve and display ordinary everyday items as it was for rare items. You can read a bit about him here if you're interested:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus_Pitt_Rivers

The PR collection ran into tens of thousands of items and he donated the main collection of 18,000 non-British exhibits to Oxford University in 1884. It has been added to substantially since then and now has over half a million items. You can view some of the collection (including Americana) here, but even today not everything has been photographed:

http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/

Thanks again
Roger

[greywolf22]

Roger
Thanks for this infomation. I will enjoy looking all this over.
regards,
Jack

[cgauthier]

I inherited this from my great uncle.   There is very little known about the piece right now, but we are still going through lots old boxes.  He was a bit of a pack rat and kept everything.   
I brought this to an archeology exhibition and everyone I showed it to beleived it is authentic.   They've estimated this piece to be 5 to 8 thousand years old.   Could this be possible? 
The piece is probably from areas between Louisiana and Texas.   I'll post more info as soon as we find it.
What do you think?   It's a bit over 9 inches and I haven't seen pictures of anything like it anywhere.   If anyone here as insight they coudld share, it would be hugely appreciated.