Understanding Chipped Stone Drills from an Iroquoian Village Site

ABSTRACT

Eighty-one complete chipped stone drills and 115 drill fragments were recovered from excavations at the Eaton site in western New York. The major occupation was an Iroquoian village dating to the mid-sixteenth century. The number of drills far exceeds the number of drilled objects from the same site. Use wear on nineteen specimens indicates their use on soft to medium resistance materials which were not preserved at the site. Consideration of chipped stone drills with long drill bits suggests that they were not used on hard materials as they would have a tendency to break. Iroquois sites to the east that are slightly later in time than the Iroquoian component at Eaton have hundreds of drilled shell beads but few chipped stone drills. We conclude that European metal drills/awls replaced chipped stone drills early in the Contact Period.

KEYWORDS:

• Drills
• use wear
• metal awls
• Iroquois

Acknowledgements

The late Jack Holland confirmed that many of the specimens in this study were drills or drill forms. Thanks go to Douglas Perrelli for information on drills from the Simmons site and for assisting Sean Hanrahan with his use wear studies. Ray Bradbury also kindly provided information on use wear. Lisa Anselmi and Susan McGuire provided assistance and access to equipment at Buffalo State University. We would like to thank Laura Kozuch for articles and Mima Kapches and Bill Finlayson for providing information on Middleport lithics. Elizabeth Peña provided information on the bore morphology of drilled stone beads. Jennifer Birch confirmed current dating of Middleport sites. George Hamell and Michael Galban shared their observations on experiments to produce holes in fresh versus dry bark. Finally, thanks go to two anonymous reviewers whose comments strengthened the manuscript.

Data Availability Statement

The drills which form the basis of this study are curated in the Anthropology Department at Buffalo State University. Data from the Eaton site has been uploaded to tDAR. The drill attribute list (document 468910) and drill Access table (dataset 468911) are part of the Eaton Chipped Stone Collection https://core.tdar.org/collection/21804/eaton-chipped-stone which is part of the Eaton Site Project (project 6030) on tDAR. Photos and observations on use wear appear in Eaton Chipped Stone Tool Use Wear Collection https://core.tdar.org/collection/71221/eaton-chipped-stone-tool-use-wear. For the distribution of drill types, see “Distribution of Drill Types and Parts 1 and 2” under the Artifact Distributions Collection, https://core.tdar.org/collection/21407/eaton-artifact-distributions.

Additional information

Funding

The Eaton site was excavated by 17 summer field schools from Buffalo State University, the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, or were jointly supported by both institutions.