Boatstone

A boatstone is a ground and polished stone shaped like a small canoe or boat hull, usually 70–100 mm long. One face is flat or hollowed out like the inside of a hull; the other forms the keel. Outlines run from long cigar shapes to ovals, rectangles and near circles, with square or pointed ends, and the cross-section is roughly triangular (Bell 1980; Hodge 1907).

Boatstones were pecked, ground and polished. Tool marks inside a Spiro example show the hollow was carefully scraped out (Lamb 2013). Many have a hole near each end, both drilled from the same side, and a groove along the keel for the binding cord. Others are flat-based, unhollowed and unperforated (Bell 1980; Beauchamp 1897). Northern examples are mostly slate, southern and western ones often steatite.

Archaeologists interpret most boatstones as atlatl weights lashed to the shaft between handle and hook, by comparison with Basketmaker atlatls from the Southwest found with stones still tied on (Bell 1980). Bell notes that careful hollowing, hidden against the shaft, suggests a charm-like role as well, and barite and hematite boatstones may also have been rubbed for pigment (Henderson and Schlarb 2007). The key trait is a hull-shaped body with a hollowed or flat underside, often with two end holes and a cord groove along the keel.

Length about 50–130 mm, most 70–100 mm (Oklahoma, Bell 1980). New York examples are 83–130 mm long, 22–32 mm high and 25–29 mm wide (Beauchamp 1897, converted from inches); a Spiro specimen is 76 × 32 mm (Lamb 2013).

Found thinly over most of the states east of the Mississippi and in southern Canada, with many good examples from Ohio (Hodge 1907; Beauchamp 1897). In Oklahoma they are fairly common in the eastern woodlands and rarer westward to the Panhandle (Bell 1980).

Turn it over: a hollowed underside with two holes drilled from the same side is the classic form. Bannerstones have one large central hole through the midrib, and gorgets have holes drilled through a thin flat plate, usually from both faces (Beauchamp 1897). Some boatstones grade into plummets, and the more conical ones into cones and hemispheres, which are solid and unperforated (Hodge 1907). In Oklahoma perforated boatstones are very rare; a keel groove alone held the cord (Bell 1980). The name describes the shape only; nineteenth-century writers listed boatstones among "problematical forms". At Tremper Mound, Ohio, Webb and Haag read the cones and boatstones as late Adena, showing the form carried into the Middle Woodland (Applegate 2008).