The Beach Yields A Secret

A few weeks back, I found this artifact on a beach here on Bowen Island while grabbing fistfuls of stones to toss into the sea. It is very weathered, from many decades spent being tossed around in the surf. It appears to be an arrowhead or spear point of First Nations origin.

Nobody around here seemed to know much about it, so I contacted the Museum of Archeology at the University of British Columbia, and shared this image with them, speculating that it might be obsidian. Patricia Ormerod, an archaeology curatorial research assistant with the university’s Laboratory of Archaeology, wrote back with the following assessment:

The material is actually a fairly fine-grained basalt. Based on its size, this point is more likely from a spear or handthrown dart than an arrowshaft. It could also have been a knife, although knives are often not symmetrical. It was created by flaking/chipping the raw material and has a shouldered base used for hafting to whatever shaft was used. The example you have is a leaf-shaped point that is quite worn. Flaked points are not the easiest ones to date as they were used over such long periods, but this one is likely no older than 2,000 years at the most. It could have been in use as recently as a few hundred years ago.

A few hundred years ago? As in circa 1700!? Wow. Even if it is only that old, it is still quite incredible to hold this and imagine what creatures it might have slayed, and by whose hand? It is even more incredible to come across it in a handful of stones gathered while basically sitting and doing nothing.