JYF ‘on Point’ WITH GENEROUS GIFT

Artifacts from these early nomadic hunters are quite rare in Virginia compared to the later Archaic and Woodland periods because of the culture’s relatively low population. Only 12,789 Paleoindian points have been registered as authentic in the United States and about 2,000 of those were found in Virginia. This gift will allow us to explore Paleoindian life in Virginia and the development of hunting technologies in response to the disappearance of ice age fauna.

The Gusler donation also includes seven stone axes dating from the Middle Archaic (6,000-2,500 B.C.E.) to the Late Woodland (900-1600 C.E.) periods. This chronology reflects the tool’s technological development that enabled greater efficiency in clearing forests, thereby encouraging the growth of food-bearing bushes and trees and drawing game closer to Indigenous settlements.

Our understanding of history is always evolving as new information is uncovered, from items previously hidden away or buried underground. Case in point, scientists are still debating when and how the first people arrived in North America. Known as Paleoindians, their culture was first documented in 1927 at a site in Folsom, New Mexico that dates to circa 9,5008,000 B.C.E. In 1932, an even earlier site was discovered in Clovis, New Mexico. This site, inhabited about 11,200 years ago, had distinctive lance-shaped fluted spear points found in association with woolly mammoth bones. These Clovis points also have been found in Virginia, including Cactus Hill (44SX0202) in Sussex County where some radiocarbon dating indicates the presence of pre-Clovis people 17,000 years ago. The large, elegant spear points were probably used to hunt the megafauna of the ice age, such as mastodons and mammoths.

Thanks to a generous gift from the collection of Liza and Wallace Gusler, the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation now has one Folsom projectile point and four Clovis points, one of which was found in Washington County, Virginia.

One of the axes has special meaning for Wallace Gusler, whose appreciation of Indigenous material culture began as a boy walking the plowed fields of Roanoke and Botetourt counties. At age 11, Wallace started working part-time at Logan’s Barn Antiques near Salem, Virginia, so he could purchase the ax on layaway. Robert H. Logan became Wallace’s first mentor in the field of antiques, which led to over 40 years with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation serving variously as master gunsmith, curator of mechanical objects, curator of furniture and director of conservation.

—Bly Straube, Ph.D., FSA, Senior Curator