Fort McCoy has hosted archaeological investigations for several decades, and these investigations have been performed by dozens of archaeologists of varying backgrounds.
The goal of the lead investigators is always to identify cultural resources like archaeological sites and collect as much data as possible to make informed decisions about how to best manage those resources. A typical goal for the archaeological field technicians assisting lead investigators is to find interesting artifacts like spear points and arrowheads. Artifacts like these are referred to as projectile points.
Projectile points can provide quite a bit of information about a person or group of people, such as the time frame they lived in, where they traveled, and some of the things they ate.
Much of this information is determined by association, but these associations are almost always based on multiple lines of evidence which reached the same (or very similar) results. Most often, these lines of evidence result from carbon dating.
Carbon dates most often come from archaeologists unearthing a fire pit or hearth and carefully collecting pieces of charcoal. These bits of charcoal are sent to a laboratory with equipment that can detect chemical changes within the sample, which in turn measures how old the charcoal sample is.
When a projectile point is found in close proximity to the fire pit or hearth, it is likely that the projectile point is approximately the same age as the charcoal from the fire pit or hearth.
Thanks to the efforts of many archaeological researchers across the state of Wisconsin and the United States, there are many documented cases for each of the numerous types of projectile points found at Fort McCoy, which give a fairly consistent date range for each projectile point type.
Because of this aggregate data, researchers can say with fairly strong confidence that the projectile point recovered from investigations at a large site on North Post in 2016 (pictured in this article) was created by someone approximately 1,500 to 2,000 years ago, during a time when people in this region were starting to practice horticulture and plant domestication. This time also saw an increase in the use of ceramics for cooking and storing foodstuffs, which allowed people to stay in one place rather than traveling hundreds of miles over the course of each year following seasonally available food resources.
This time period is also marked by the appearance of conical burial mounds. Conical burial mounds were constructed by placing basketloads of sand and dirt over human remains as a way to honor and protect the dead. Mounds like these vary in size but have been recorded as large as 20 feet across and 8 feet high. Conical mounds were the precursors to shaped earthworks, such as linear mounds and the later effigy mounds shaped like people and animals.
This particular projectile point would have been too large and heavy to attach to an arrow. It would have instead been attached to a spear fore shaft, which is a detachable insert that fits into a spear main shaft. A seasoned hunter would typically take one spear shaft and a handful of fore shafts on a hunt, as this would allow them to reload relatively quickly when engaging their prey. The point is made from Prairie du Chien chert, which is a locally available stone tool material that comprises approximately half of the stone tools and stone tool debris found at Fort McCoy. It is missing its tip but is otherwise a complete, intact example of one of the projectile point styles in use at the time.
All archaeological work conducted at Fort McCoy was coordinated by the Directorate of Public Works Environmental Division Natural Resources Branch.
(Article prepared by the Directorate of Public Works Environmental Division Natural Resources Branch.)
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