Tallahatta Quartzite: Choctaw Silver Stone

Through this post, we'd like to share a path of learning and reconnecting. Although this writing will be brief, the path itself begins in the Choctaw homeland back in deep time, and it journeys up to the present, representing a special tie between Choctaw ancestors and the land. This part of culture is not widely known outside of the Mississippi/Alabama area.

(Note from the future - We generally like to keep our older blog posts around to document the progression in knowledge as we learn new things through the Nan Awaya Farm experiment. However, since this original post was written, we've learned and experienced quite a bit more about Tallahatta that we would like to share. We're not doing a second post on the same topic and there is no good way to archive old posts in Wix, so it's out with the old post and in with the newly updated one 4/10/26).

If you were to take the spearhead in the title image back about 40 million years in time, it would be a handful of sand sitting on an ocean beach in present-day Choctaw County, Alabama. This is a time period known to geologists as middle Eocene. In the Eocene, as our sand is washing around on the beach, the continents of Europe and North America are in the process of slowly separating from each other through continental drift. The forebears of modern mammals are developing, among them, the dog-sized ancestors of the horse.

In some ways, the Eocene world was vastly different from today’s, and yet in other ways it's a world that we're headed towards. The early middle Eocene was a time when lots of CO2 was in the air. The CO2 warmed the planet and oceans enough that it caused sea level to rise to the point that present-day central Mississippi was ocean front property; Florida was completely under water. Today, the concentration of CO2 in the air is rapidly rising due to human action. Every gallon of gasoline we burn is bringing us a little closer to a past/future like the Eocene.

After tumbling around in the surf and sun on its tropical Eocene beach, our silica sand eventually gets buried over in sediment. Geologic ages pass with our sand sitting in silent, smothering darkness. Newer sediments pile up as events continue on the surface up above. Silica-rich water percolates through the sediments; eventually the sand grains are fused within an opal matrix. Our loose sand has now become a hard, beautiful rock, technically a kind of sandstone, although most people call it "Tallahatta quartzite". The fresh stone is gorgeous, with translucent, silver and white, sugary sand grains that can make this material look like it's a block of sleet pellets frozen together. The stone often has alternating patches of whitish and dark-gray color. The darker color comes from higher concentrations of glauconite (a mineral formed in marine environments) in the matrix.

Fast forward to the early 1800s. Materials left from the Eocene beach have long ago become a long, narrow band of rocks that extends across much of the Southeast. Alternating layers of sandstone and claystone are exposed on the surface in places where the overlying sediments have eroded away. Our Tallahatta sandstone is found at the western end of this formation, in a few counties of eastern Mississippi and southwestern Alabama (Although to complicate things, a similar-looking stone can also be found in Louisiana). As American colonizers settle in and around the Choctaw homeland, they occasionally seek out this hard sandstone and fashion it into millstones used to grind grain into flour. At first, they call the rock “buhrstone”. As geologists learn more about the layers of rocks in the area, they give them more specific names. In 1898, Professor E. A. Smith suggests that the name of this formation of Eocene rocks should be changed to "Tallahatta". This name refers to the Tallahatta Hills in Alabama where the formation outcrops. I don't know if it was Professor Smith's intention or not, but the name change connects this special stone back to an Indigenous history in a cool kind of circle.

In the Choctaw language, Tvli Hatta means “Silver Stone”. Through the name change, the English name for the stone has become the same as the Choctaw name for it. How often does geology call rocks by the same name as the Indigenous people who used them? - Not very. The Choctaw name for the stone is a bit intriguing in its own right because "tvli hatta" is also the Choctaw name for the white underbelly on a fish. Is it just coincidence that in this descriptive language the light-colored stone and the light-colored scaly underbelly of a fish would have the same name? Possibly. It's also possible that the names are a surviving trace of ancient Choctaw flintknapping cultural lore that connects the stone with fish. If so, I don't quite have the knowledge to make that connection out.

Since time immemorial, Tallahatta sandstone was an important resource for the Choctaw ancestors. It's one of the few types of rock in the area that breaks like glass, allowing it to be chipped into sharp-edged tools and weapons. Choctaw people named two streams after this stone, one in Clarke County, AL, and one in Newton County, MS. Both of these Tallahatta Creeks cut down through the sediments and expose the sandstone, where it can easily be picked up or quarried. It is also exposed on some dry hillsides. The eroding Tallahatta sandstone takes the form of big, heavy slabs, several inches in thickness. Ancient stone-workers broke these down into massive flakes, called "spalls". Spalls could be chipped into blanks for making spear points and tools. The stone was often transported back home in the form of blanks. Finished points and tools were also sometimes made at or near the quarry sites. Today, the debris left from processing still covers the ground at some of these places. All of that debris represents weight that the ancestors didn't have to carry in their packs.

A Tallahatta sandstone quarry in Clarke County, AL.

One day in 2025, our friends Phil and Sarah, gave me an incredible experience, visiting a Tallahatta quarry site in Clarke County, Alabama; one that has been used since Clovis times. The south Alabama summer afternoon was warm and muggy. We headed down to a gorgeous creek. Its water and air were pleasantly cool. The water itself was brown with tannic acid from tree leaves. There were no mosquitos or biting flies. The white sand banks made a neat contrast with the dark water. The farther we waded up this stream, the more Tallahatta flintknapping debris we began coming across in the water. Eventually, the sandbars and a lot of the stream bed became mostly Tallahatta flakes and spalls, created by 600 generations of ancestors. Picking up a piece of debitage and feeling the connection with a kindred flintknapper from thousands of years ago is a feeling I've gotten to experience countless times. Being in this special place multiplied that sensation a hundred fold. Eventually, we made it up to a 1ft-high water fall. This fall was created from the Tallahatta sandstone bedrock. This was the material we (and the ancients) had come for. We pried a few pieces out of the stream bed, gave thanks, and carried them out of the stream. Some of the stone went as practice material to local archaeology students and part of a bucket came back to Oklahoma with me. I've rationed this special stone, working a piece every few months. Many of the points shown in this post are made from it. Phil and Sarah, thank you for an experience of a lifetime! It's something I can incorporate into what we do an Nan Awaua Farm and something that will inform the cultural revitalization work I do for the Tribe in my day job from now on.

Tallahatta stone artifacts from the same county where we collected ours. Left: a Clovis point. Middle and right: two Hardin points. This was the first time I'd seen a Hardin point made from this material (I've seen others since). The point in the middle has an impact fracture on the tip. Clarke County Historical Society Museum https://www.clarkemuseum.com/

A number of Clovis points made from Tallahatta quartzite have been found in southwestern Alabama. These were made 13,200-12,900 years ago, by people who lived with Columbian mammoths and mastodons. By 5,000 years ago, massive amounts of this stone were being quarried. For several thousand years, people living in the Choctaw homeland traded points and blades Tallahatta widely. Finished spear points made from it ended up all the way at Poverty Point, a World Heritage Site in present-day Louisiana and at other sites as far away as southern Indiana. At least, this is the common interpretation (Remember the similar-looking stone from Louisiana? Currently, there's no test to differentiate the two). As millennia passed, people in the homeland eventually stopped trading the stone so widely, but continued to use it themselves. I’ve seen a small, triangular Tallahatta arrow point collected on a Choctaw homestead site in Mississippi that dates to the time of the Trail of Tears.

Three views of a Clovis I made from a piece of the material we collected, a year after the trip. Using a heavy antler punch, I had struggled fluting Tallahatta for a while. To my surprise a light, antler tine punch has given me better results.

A Hardin I point made from our stone a year after the trip. When I saw the two Hardin points made from Tallahatta in the museum collection, I was surprised because it seem to me like Tallahatta wouldn't hold up to notching with a punch, a tool required to make this style. Turns out, although it does behave a little differently, Tallahatta is definitely punch-notch-able. This stone keeps surprising me.

The first time that I handled Tallahatta was as a student. The stone was in the form of ancient spear points that had been sitting in paper bags from an archaeological excavation decades earlier. The material was crumbly, with grains of sand falling off the edges of the points as I gently handled them. How could such a material ever make a usable cutting edge? I would later learn that the crumbliness I observed was the effect of these points having sat in Alabama’s acidic soils for centuries. The acids had literally begun to dissolve the matrix holding the grains of sand together. When removed from the ground and dried out in the bags, the surface of the stone starts to crumble away. This happens more on some pieces of Tallahatta than others, and it doesn't happen to artifacts that have spent their time in the water.

Every different type of stone that you can chip tools from has its own personality, but Tallahatta stands out for its quirkiness. The matrix holds the sand grains together, but they're not totally fused. When you chip Tallahatta, the fracture breaks through the individual sand grains, but not smoothly. This leaves a granular, sparkly surface on the fractured stone. The sand grains act a bit like temper particles in pottery. The quartz sand has a different density than the matrix and when you hit the stone to drive off a flake, the sand grains diffuse some of the energy. Thus, Tallahatta is tough, but at the same time seems a little spongy in the way it absorbs energy from the blows. Even the fresh stuff is a little crumbly. You can easily snap a flake of it between your fingers, which you can't do with most types of "flint".

Left: a middle Paleo-style Quad point made from some of our stone. The dark glauconite patches are prevalent in this piece. I'm not sure what causes the yellow patch on the left ear. Maybe iron? Right: an early Archaic-style Bolen point made from our stone.

Tallahatta chips easiest when it's fresh out of the ground, so I've been storing my stone in a bucket of water (with a little Clorox) for the past year. There's something poetic about returning 40-million-year old beach sand to the water. Rather than working the stone right out of the bucket (which makes antler tools wet and spongy), I've found it's best to take the stone out of the bucket and allow it to sit for a few days before working it. Given its graininess, Tallahatta flakes much better than I would have first guessed. As it turns out, Tallahatta pressure flakes quite well. With the right tools and technique, you can even make some pretty delicate notches in it. I understand that some people in the past probably worked Tallahatta sandstone using wooden tools, rather than antler ones. I've yet to try that.

A few late Archaic-style points made of Choctaw County Tallahatta, showing the punch tool that I used to chip them.

The stone we picked up is at the finer-grained end of the spectrum for Tallahatta. The fresh, broken edges are fairly sharp, especially if you let the stone dry a bit before chipping. A spear tipped with a Tallahatta point traveling towards a deer at 100mph would do the job quite well. However, due to the crumbliness of the edge, this stone would not be on my list of materials for making a scraper to thin a buffalo hide. Edge durability issues aside, the size, beauty and cool-looking translucence were factors in why Tallahatta was imported in such large amounts into other regions where people had access to types of stone that produce a tougher edge.

As I've said in previous posts, it's a privilege to get to make pieces of traditional art from exactly the same materials that your ancestors used for hundreds of generations before you. Silver Stone has been a part of the Choctaw homeland for millions of years, and is an important part of Indigenous Choctaw culture. I'm glad to get to share a little bit about it with our readers through this post.