Any ideas?

[Hardin88]

It's heavy. Appears to be granite. The narrow end is dimpled. Perfect teardrop shape.

[OnewiththewilD]

wow,thats pretty cool! kinda a headscratcher, looks like a broken plummet but the top "break" looks like its been used to pound on stuff.maybe re-utilized?  :dunno:  its cool though!

[Bolen Bevel 1]

Dimple or bola stone.
Bola stones were used as hunting weapons which consisted of two or more weights connected by one or more cords. It was thrown to entangle a target.

[rmartin]

Looks pretty large to be a hardstone plummet. That being said, I have no idea but it is definitely an artifact of some sort. Really a nifty piece!

[painshill]

Bolen Bevel 1 wrote:

Dimple or bola stone.

  Yes... "dimple stone" is the preferred term for these artefacts I think and "bola" is a probable but uncertain attribution which may not apply to all such stones. I had understood these to be late Paleo generally.
I don't think it's granite though.

[Bolen Bevel 1]

[QUOTE]painshill wrote:

Dimple or bola stone.

  Yes... "dimple stone" is the preferred term I think and "bola" is a probable but uncertain attribution which may not apply to all such stones. I had understood these to be late Paleo generally.
I don't think it's granite though.
They are considered late Paleo/transitional period and are considered the oldest type of ground stone relic.

[Bolen Bevel 1]

I also might add that it's a very nice artifact and not common at all.

[Hardin88]

I can't get an exact weight, but it's close to 2.8 pounds. Too light to be lead. There are small crystalizations in it as well. All the dimple stones I found online weren't anywhere near as quality in shape as this one. Not sure that's what I'd call it.
Thanks for the input.

[Bolen Bevel 1]

I think it's made from Hematite

[painshill]

There’s some more info here:

http://www.peachstatearchaeologicalsociety.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=226:Bolo-Stones&catid&Itemid=58

… and a beautiful quartzite example at the bottom of the page here:

http://www.artifactsguide.com/discus/messages/12/19936.html?1126702796

I don’t think that either of the following are available on-line for free, but here’s a couple of references:
Egg Stones: A General Discussion. The Profile. Newsletter of the Society for Georgia Archaeology 53:6-8 (1986). Whatley, John R., Jr.
Dimple stones - an unique and early ground stone artifact type from the Southeast. American Society for Amateur Archaeology Volume 10 (2), 2004 (pp. 57-76). Thomas Rachels and Robert L. Knight.
Knight reports quartzite as the most common material for these stones in Georgia and Florida, despite the fact that it does not naturally occur in the Georgia and Florida coastal plain. The concentration of 16 PaleoIndian and Early Archaic sites in the Feronia locality of Georgia near the Big Bend of the Ocmulgee River in northern Coffee County have yielded several egg-shaped stones of ferruginous sandstone, one of which was dimpled (Blanton and Snow 1986, 1989). Whatley (in the reference above) tentatively interpreted them as bolas weights. Comparable artefacts were reported by Blanton (1979) from the Jack Wildes site (9Bc16) along the Satilla River.

[CliffJ]

It looks exactly like an eggstone, except for the large size. It is too big and heavy to use as a bolo IMO, and I've never seen one that large. Most are chicken egg-sized. I'm not sure that eggstones are found outside of the South, either. Where is it from?

[painshill]

CliffJ wrote:

It looks exactly like an eggstone, except for the large size. It is too big and heavy to use as a bolo IMO, and I've never seen one that large. Most are chicken egg-sized. I'm not sure that eggstones are found outside of the South, either. Where is it from?

I did mention earlier in the post that "egg stones" with a dimple are not conclusively demonstrated to be bola stones and that the preferred non-judgemental archaeological term is "dimple stone". It's not even demonstrated that all stones of this type had the same function. The degree of care in working and polishing the finer examples is counter-intuitive to the bola attribution and - as you say - this one is an unreasonably large example for that kind of use. There are other theories, including that they were used as some sort of club head with the dimple located on a handle and wet buckskin stretched over and tied on to the assemblage.