Greater Ancestors

World Museum

Solutrean Spearheads

Too Big to be a spear?

There was a burial of several spear heads, and which is thought to have been ceremonial, as the spear heads were so large and so thin as to have been useless for hunting, or so it is thought. The spear heads were not grave goods, they had been buried by themselves. The archaeologists who found them thought it was a ceremonial offering of some kind.

You see a comparison of one of the Solutrean spear heads to a typical Clovis spearhead. The hypothesis of the archaeologist who found it . . . stated that the Solutrean knappers made special large spear heads with no practical value for ceremonial purposes.
The Clovis point is about 10 inches long
–the Solutrean point is 20 inches long or more, and very wide.
It is also thinner than the Clovis point.

Since November 2011, a team of archaeologists from L’Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives (Inrap), have been excavating the site of a Solutrean hunters camp in Brantome (Dordogne), southwest France, prior to the construction of a waste management plant.

Archaeological evaluation, conducted in October 2010, revealed the presence of Palaeolithic activity buried more than two metres deep.
Several thousand flints were unearthed by archaeologists, who have identified areas of production for sophisticated stone tools, such as the typical laurel leaf projectile points, notched blades and flat-faced points that are characteristic of the Solutrean culture.

As in other sites of the late Solutrean, the quality of some bifacial pieces, including the “laurel leave” type, show that the flint-knappers of this culture from the Upper Palaeolithic had acquired an expertise unrivalled during Prehistory; these pieces are thin and slender and have been crafted with extreme care – remarkable for both their symmetrical beauty and their cutting performance. The site has provided a large number of blanks and fragments, showing a large scale production of tools was taking place here.

Solutrean flint knappers had access to many quality materials on the alluvial terraces of the Island, including; flint nodules; pebbles of quartzite; dolerite and shale which was not only used for producing tools but also for construction of dwellings. The study of the lithic industry material from the camp at Boulazac highlights the origin of several non-local materials. Many tools come from Bergerac, about 50 km away, or Fumélois, on the right bank of the Lot more than 70 km away.

Solutrean tool-making employed techniques not seen before with finely worked bifacial points made with lithic reduction percussion and pressure flaking rather than previous cruder flint-knapping techniques. Knapping was done using antler batons, hardwood batons and soft stone hammers which permitted the working of more delicate slivers of flint to make lighter projectiles and even elaborate barbed and tangled arrowheads.

http://able2know.org/topic/168338-2

http://livelikedirt.blogspot.com/2010/06/paleolithic-tools-solutrean-points.html

From the Glozel hand prints, the well verified Castelnau skeleton, and many others France has a good history of Greater-Anthropology. The largest spear point in the World is there not by coincidence and is a giant-artifact well verified and corroborated by a great many other finds.

Chris L Lesley/GreaterAncestorsWorldMuseum


Comments

Comment

*