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:
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