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Named stone

Maine and New Hampshire rhyolites

Also called Kineo rhyolite, Kineo/Traveler rhyolite, Kineo felsite, Traveler rhyolite, New Hampshire flow-banded spherulitic rhyolite (Berlin and Jefferson)

A kind of rhyolite, felsite and metavolcanic rock

Maine and New Hampshire rhyolitesRhyolite, felsite and metavolcanic rockNortheast

Description

Maine and New Hampshire have two main rhyolite stones. Kineo and Traveler rhyolite, also called felsite or porphyry, forms a huge volcanic complex around Moosehead Lake in central Maine, and glaciers carried pieces to the coast, so knappable blocks turn up in gravels far from the outcrops. It is blue-gray on a fresh break, weathers bone-white and is coarser grained than the cherts that early hunters preferred. Fluted-point hunters largely ignored it, but later Paleoindian groups used it heavily. The second group is flow-banded, spherulitic rhyolite from tiny New Hampshire sources near Berlin and Jefferson, which does appear in fluted-point assemblages.

How to identify it

Colour
Traveler Rhyolite felsite is blue-gray and weathers bone-white; a garnet-bearing variety is blue-gray weathering greenish-white (USGS state geologic map unit).
Texture
Massive and conchoidally fracturing felsite; coarser grained than the preferred Paleoindian cherts (Kitchel).
Inclusions
Quartz and feldspar phenocrysts (Traveler Rhyolite); garnet and white feldspar phenocrysts in the garnet variety.

Geology

Kineo/Traveler rhyolite belongs to a Devonian volcanic complex of several cubic kilometres in volume: the Traveler Rhyolite and the Kineo Rhyolite Member of the Tomhegan Formation, in Penobscot and Piscataquis counties, up to about 4,000 feet thick. The NPS describes the Katahdin granite and Traveler Rhyolite as the remains of a supervolcano that erupted about 407 million years ago. Glacial action moved clasts to the southeast toward the coast. The New Hampshire flow-banded, spherulitic rhyolites come from a single dyke near Berlin and from glacial lag deposits near Jefferson.

Where it comes from

Northeast

States

Quarries and outcrops

  • Moosehead Lake area, central Maine (Kineo rhyolite source area)
  • Traveler Rhyolite, Penobscot and Piscataquis counties, Maine
  • Berlin, New Hampshire (single dyke source)
  • Glacial lag near Jefferson, New Hampshire

Used by

  • Fluted-point period: New Hampshire rhyolites are the next most common stone after red Munsungun chert in Northeast assemblages; Kineo/Traveler rhyolite is almost absent (Kitchel)
  • Late Paleoindian: Kineo/Traveler rhyolite dominates assemblages at the Cliche-Rancourt-Mamsalhabika site, Quebec, and large thin bifaces were made from it (Kitchel)

Look-alikes

Stones that are easy to confuse with Maine and New Hampshire rhyolites.

  • Munsungun chert (a very different, fine-grained chert), which Kineo rhyolite replaced in late Paleoindian toolkits
  • Other felsic volcanic rock of the Appalachians

Sources

  1. Kitchel, Nathaniel R. 2024. Facing the Forest: Climate Change and Human Adaptation Across the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition in Northern New England and Eastern Canada. PaleoAmerica (online 28 Oct 2024). doi:10.1080/20555563.2024.2414630.par.nsf.gov (opens in a new tab)
  2. U.S. Geological Survey. State Geologic Map Compilation: Devonian Traveler Rhyolite Pogy member (MEDtrp;0), Maine.mrdata.usgs.gov (opens in a new tab)
  3. National Park Service. Geology. Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument.nps.gov (opens in a new tab)

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