What are the advantages of equipping a wooden arrow with stone, rather than just using the sharpened wooden tip? Very few it seems. In a series of well-controlled experiments the authors show that stone arrow-heads achieve barely 10 per cent extra penetration over wood. They then raise some pertinent ideas about the other advantages, social and symbolic that may have driven hunters the world over to adopt the stone tip.

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This article summarizes the results of controlled experiments in which flaked-stone points that varied in impact strength by a factor of almost three were shot at media that were increasingly inelastic and therefore likely to break the points. Broken tips were reworked if possible, and used again under the same conditions. Our results show that all damage to low impact-strength materials, especially obsidian, was generally catastrophic, and, consequently, these points could only rarely be reworked. The fact that low-strength stones were commonly used to make small arrowpoints suggests that reworking was not a primary concern for their designers. Furthermore, in those instances when broken tips could be reworked, their performance declined. In addition, reworking broken points also resulted in shapes that are uncommon in many arrowpoint assemblages. Our results suggest that the original design attributes of arrowpoints may have been less affected by reworking, and, consequently, may more accurately suggest temporal and behavioral associations.

stones and bones are the fundamental building blocks of prehistory, especially the deep hominin prehistory. The only thing that survives from the earliest humans, except in rare instances of the humans themselves, is stones and bones in that order. it was in this context that the late archaeologist Glynn isaac (1977) characterized the archaeology of the earliest humans as "squeezing blood from stones." stones and bones must, however, be placed in context, and that largely comes from profiles or rather stratigraphy. stones, bones, and profiles thus constitute the three building blocks of much of the early archaeology from the appearance of earliest humans to the advent of the neolithic or its equivalents on various continents. so it is no wonder that this book, dedicated to two prominent scholars whose careers focused on the earliest americans, the Paleoindians, is about stones, bones, and profiles. in fact, tools and tool making from raw stone material and the remains of food residues, or one of these, are what we find at nearly all Paleoindian sites in western north america. Where we find them and in what contexts are key to understanding the implications of these remains for reconstructing the lifeways of ancient peoples. and by and large, other items are rare or absent, except in a few cases, and often these are likewise made of either stone or bone. We are referring to such things as bone tools (needles, awls, gaming pieces, and others), ornaments (beads), and possibly in a few instances