Post Category : Glossary Special Finds
Bone Needle
By Reid Graham on June 16, 2016
This week we showcase a very unique artifact, a bone needle. This tool is very long and thick compared to the modern steel needles that we are more familiar with, but it still very sharp at the tip. The eye of the needle is diamond-shaped and tapered, which shows us that the eye was made by gouging the bone with a stone flake, rather than using a bow drill. A bow drill would have left a round hole rather than a diamond-shaped one. This type of artifact is extremely rare in North America, especially one that is complete. Most of the time when they are found, bone needles like these are broken around the eye, or you just find the tip of the needle.
This artifact was found in a dry cave in Utah, which is filled with artifacts left behind from thousands of years of indigenous people living in the cave. These repeated occupations left behind countless layers of juniper bark, which was laid down as a floor matting. The bone needle was found three meters below the modern surface. Talk about finding a needle in a haystack!
Related Posts
By Fallon Hardie

February 3, 2023
Lanceolate Bifaces of The Interior Plateau, BC
Spear Points in the Forest In the summer of 2022, archaeologists Braedy Chapman and Fallon Hardie conducted archaeological impact assessments (AIA’s) on emergency wildfire rehabilitation developments. These developments were constructed to manage the spread and impact of wildfire throughout the Interior Plateau of British Columbia. Long stretches of forest have been scraped or bladed to
Keep ReadingTags: Alberta | Archaeology | Arrowstone Hills | Biface | British Columbia | Chasm Canyon | Cordilleran | CRM | Holocene | Interior Plateau | Lanceolate | Lithics | Lochnore Phase | Pleistocene | projectile point | pXRF | Shuswap Horizon | Sites | Special Finds
By Angela Younie

April 21, 2022
Glossary Series – Beaver River Sandstone
Beaver River Sandstone is a stone used for flintknapping that was found in two major quarries near Fort McKay in northern Alberta. It can appear in all shades of grey and brownish grey, with small embedded crystals of medium to dark grey quartz (called “inclusions”). Depending on where it was quarried, it can range from
Keep ReadingTags: Alberta | Archaeology | Beaver River Sandstone | CRM | Fort McKay | Fort McMurray | Indigenous Peoples | Lithics
By Alyssa Hamza

February 7, 2022
Glossary Series – Fire Cracked Rock
Fire Cracked, or Broken, Rock (FCR or FBR) is a type of artifact found at many archaeological sites in Alberta. It is created by heat cycling a stone (eg. heating it up and then cooling it off). If the stone is cooled very quickly, it can fracture, or even explode! Repeatedly heat cycling a rock
Keep ReadingTags: Alberta | Bodo | FBR | Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump | Indigenous Peoples