As I have mentioned in previous posts, I was fortunate to begin our Anthropology Club at my high school in 2022.  Our club meets monthly, and we always try to find interesting content to share with our members.  This can be challenging at times, since club meetings are after school.  We do announce them well in advance, but we are often competing with other after school activities, sports, etc. for member attendance.  When Iris (our vice-president) and I have something particularly interesting to share, we try to advertise our agenda well in advance to maximize attendance.  

Our February 2024 meeting was one such meeting.  Iris’s grandfather collected projected points over the years from near his home in Leesburg, North Carolina. He passed a large portion of that collection on to Iris.  Lucky for us, Iris brough the collection to our last club meeting to share with our members.  They were able to pass around the points and see the tool marks and differing types of points and stones from which they are made.  We took pictures of each of the points with a pen in the photo for scale.  I, then, passed those photos along for identification to Professor Chris Judge, an archeologist.  He is my friend, mentor and faculty contact at USC-Lancaster.  

We learned that a few are middle archaic, one is early archaic, two are biface, one is side-notched archaic, and one is exotic raw material.  Iris’s personal favorite from the collection is Guilford Middle Archaic.  There was also a red one with flakes that is exotic chert ridge/ Valley of Tennessee.  We will present this information at our March club meeting in addition to sharing a video that Professor Judge passed along depicting Early and Middle Archaic projectile points from the Native American South Carolina Archive.

This projectile point collection was great content for our club as it was something tangible that our members could see and feel.  

We hope to share similar content in the future.  In addition, I hope to have Professor Judge speak to our club via Zoom regarding his work as an archeologist.