Tuscaloosa Chert: Choctaw Heritage in Stone
Some rocks are the custodians of deep stories for Indigenous people. A kind of rock known as tvsvnnuk in the Choctaw language and "Tuscaloosa chert" in English, is such a stone. This rock is one of the primary raw materials in the Choctaw homeland that can be chipped into sharp-edged tools and weapons. Over 13,000 years, Choctaw grandfathers living in what is now west-central Alabama and east-central Mississippi used this stone in writing their personal life stories as craftsmen, as hunters, and as warriors. Generation by generation, they cumulatively imprinted Tuscaloosa chert with what became a deep body of Indigenous knowledge and Tribal history. The Choctaw community moved away from using stone tools centuries ago, and most of the connections with this stone have been asleep now for a long time. Yet, even from today's distanced vantage point, it's possible to read this stone and, in so-doing, to bring some sleeping parts of Choctaw heritage back to light.
For all its cultural importance, Tuscaloosa chert is a pretty mundane-looking rock. It was created hundreds of millions of years ago in ocean floor deposits that became part of the Ft. Payne and Tuscumbia formations. Eventually, the ocean subsided and these formations were exposed to the air and weather. The relatively soft limestone eroded away, leaving behind resilient pieces of chert. Chert is fine grained and comprised mostly of silica. These two qualities allow it to break with a sharp-edged conchoidal fracture, like glass. That's what makes it useful for making sharp-edged tools. In the late Cretaceous period (the final days of the dinosaurs), the exposed stone that would become Tuscaloosa chert was naturally broken up into gravel and redeposited in new sediments along ridge tops where the foothills of the Appalachians meet the Gulf Coastal Plain. As these sediments eroded, rounded Tuscaloosa gravel pieces made their way into the Tombigbee River and its tributaries. The river sorted them. In the north, near the source area, the cobbles are larger. They decrease in size as you head south. I've seen pieces of Tuscaloosa chert up to 6 inches long in north Mississippi and 4 inches long in the northernmost part of Choctaw country. Deposits extend as far downstream as Pickens County, Alabama, where most pieces are 1-2 inches long. Tuscaloosa chert cobbles also tend to grade from lighter-colored in the north to more yellowish-tan in the south.
Other types of chert that are visually indistinguishable from Tuscaloosa were deposited at different times in the geologic past across the southern 1/3 of present-day Mississippi. Once known to geologists as Citronelle, these are now called pre-loess gravels (Leard 2025). Their size tends to be on the smaller side. Larger pieces of similar stone can also be found in gravel deposits along the Mississippi River.
Tuscaloosa chert cobbles are covered in a light-colored cortex of material created by millions of years of weathering. Inside the cortex, this stone's quality can range from chalky, to grainy and tough, to slick and very hard. Zigzagged lines of quartz commonly run through the material. These were created anciently, when the stone, still buried underground was broken by geologic pressure and re-healed with silica-rich solution. Known as stylolites, these pretty lines usually represent flaws in the stone that can make shaping it difficult. The Choctaw grandfathers would have waded the streams looking for gravel bars and picked through the cobbles to find ones that looked promising. Carrying a hammerstone with them, they would have knocked chips off to assess the quality of the material inside before carrying the stone up the stream bank.
Archaeologists often use stone projectile points to help date archaeological deposits. That is valuable, but when looked at from a perspective internal to Choctaw culture, stone projectile points are more than just artifacts and time markers. As our readers know, each deer season I hunt on the same land where we live, using a traditional Choctaw bow, tendon bowstring, and arrows made of straightened tree saplings tipped with points of stone. Sometimes, the stone is Tuscaloosa chert. In doing this, I experience the tiniest bit of something the grandfathers knew well. Staying alert out on the landscape for hours and days, waiting for a deer to offer itself, you get to thinking... You're here to harvest an animal whose senses, reflexes and athleticism are superior to your own, an animal that has more right to exist on this land than you do. You're hoping to harvest it basically with a stick... What enables the stick to do that? - It's the little piece of stone attached to your arrow's tip. The stone has been here a lot longer than the deer and it will be here long after all of us are gone. There's a certain respect and a sacredness in relying on the stone to make this harvest. As you wait, you think about the depths of antiquity from which the stone on your arrow has come, about the grandfathers who hunted using this same kind of stone, and about the mentors who taught you how to shape it. You wonder if you've put enough of your own energy into your point so that it can make a clean harvest instead of bouncing off. Suddenly, the animal is right in front of you. The stone streaks away into the air almost faster than your eye can perceive...
If one of my stone point were to fail, Amy would still most likely let me eat the next day. The ancestors didn't usually exist on the brink of starvation, the way people tend to think they did, but if a grandfather's stone point failed, his hunting camp might go hungry for a night. If the point didn't perform, he might not be able to stop an onrushing psychopath from harming someone he loved. In a real sense, the lives of the ancestors sometimes literally depended on the stone on the end of an arrow or spears.
Looking at the original artifacts, it's clear that the level of artistic craftsmanship that the earliest Choctaw grandfathers invested in their stone points goes well beyond what was physically required to harvest an animal or fell an enemy. From the craftsmanship, you can see that they were intentionally putting a part of themselves into the stone. This goes back to respect - They put forward their very best effort into shaping the stone that they hoped would harvest an animal or stop an enemy that they respected. Spiritual power was involved, No doubt, ceremony, prayers, and thousands of years of esoteric cultural knowledge were also invested in their stone points before a hunter left home with them.
Fragile in nature, stone tips were rarely used for practice shots. Almost every projectile point that a grandfather sent streaking out into the air was a hunting story that would be told around the evening fire or it was a moment with the potential to define a man as either a respected warrior or a spiritually impotent failure for the rest of his life. Barring revolutionary new advances in forensic technology, an ancient stone point will never be able to tell us these kinds of riveting individual stories in very much detail. From an impact fracture, an ancient point can tell us that it was probably fired into something hard. From microscopic traces of blood residue, it might be able to tell us what kind of animal it was used to harvest. That's about all an ancient point can do to relate the action stories it has been involved it. It can tell us much more about how it was made, however, and that is ultimately more important for illuminating Tribal heritage.
Siliceous stones carry stories of Indigenous life in an interesting way. The stone is shaped into tools through controlled flaking. A flake can pass through the stone in a fraction of an instant. This fracture leaves behind a scar on the stone's surface. Complex projectile points are shaped by removing hundreds of flakes. For a skilled flintknapper, it's like a chess game, one flake removal sets up the conditions to remove the next flake and so on. When the chipping is done, the stone moves back outside of the human timescale. The flake scars left on a stone tool bear record of the maker's decisions in second-by second detail, and they will still bear that record hundreds of thousands of years later. In a similar vein, while much has changed over the past 13,000 years, one thing that has not changed is the way that Tuscaloosa chert breaks. If you try to shape a cobble Tuscaloosa chert into a projectile point, yourself, using the same tools as the grandfathers, the stone puts you in exactly the same place they were. The time gap is gone because the stone exists outside the human time scale. Informed by studying the flake scars on the original pieces, this is an opportunity to re-learn ancient stone working traditions that haven't been practiced in millennia.
If you saw our last post, you know that stone projectile points are made in specific styles that each connect with native landscapes, generations of ancestors, specific sets of stone-working tools, and specific stone-working techniques. That post looked at just one style of point: the Clovis. The same thing can be done for a sequence of point styles made through time. It's possible to bring to light not just one style of point, but to shed light on an entire ancestral chipped stone tradition.
Tuscaloosa chert was a resource of immense value to Choctaw ancestors, some of whom lived in areas where other types of stone for making tools were not available. I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth, but to give a fair assessment I will say that compared to many other types of siliceous rocks found in other regions, Tuscaloosa chert is not an easy stone to work. Its small size and rounded shape are the least ideal combination for a flintknapper to start with. This stone is also very tough, taking a lot of force to chip and shape. After working raw Tuscaloosa chert, your holding leg will be bruised. If you're not used to it, the next day, your tired arms and hands will remind you of the fight that this stone put up. After expending the effort to work the rounded cobble of Tuscaloosa chert all the way down into a thin, flat blade, a hidden stylolite might just break your tool in half for you. Modern flintknappers have their pick of stones to use. I don't know any who choose to use raw Tuscaloosa chert, and certainly not any who shape it with the same antler and bone tools used by the Choctaw grandfathers. If your main intent is not just to make a big pretty point, but to revitalize a part of Indigenous heritage, and if part of that heritage is written in Tuscaloosa chert, then that changes the dynamic.
Over the past four years, I have attempted to learn about the earlier styles of the projectile points made in the Choctaw homeland (roughly 13,000-9,000 years ago) in a focused way. I've studied original pieces, read archaeological reports (see here, here, here, and here for some great syntheses), and done lots of hands-on experimentation. For the experiments, I've used mostly raw Tuscaloosa chert and shaped it with stone, antler, and bone tools. Using raw Tuscaloosa chert is a little on the harder end of the spectrum, even for what the grandfathers themselves did during some of the time periods in question. Going to this side of the spectrum makes me feel more connected to the essence of the ancestral stone-working tradition. I'm grateful to a friend from Mississippi who has supplied me with the biggest Tuscaloosa chert cobbles I have ever laid hands on, to do this work. The rest of this post presents some hopefully interesting things about deep Choctaw history and historical connections. All of it is written in Tuscaloosa chert.
Clovis (13,100-12,800 years ago), is the oldest-known lithic technology from the Choctaw homeland. It was made by people across all habitable regions of North America, but Clovis points are most abundant in the Southeast. For decades, archaeologists have hypothesized that Clovis technology might have originated there. The ancestors who made these points lived at the end of the last Ice Age in a different world than we know today. They shared it with elephants and saber tooth tigers. These fluted points were used to hunt and process giant animals, among other things. The manufacture of Clovis points is distinguished by powerful, highly controlled percussion flake removals. Evidence indicates that stone-workers accomplished this using the mechanical advantage of a horizontal punch (see our previous post). I have yet to see an original Clovis point made from Tuscaloosa chert. Even in the areas where this stone is common, the Clovis points are made from Tallahatta Sandstone or Coastal Plain Chert that was carried in, sometimes from as far away as 100 miles. Apparently, Tuscaloosa was too small for the original Clovis knappers to mess with if they could find or carry in any other kind of stone. However, in central and western Mississippi, Clovis points were made from gravels that look and behave just like Tuscaloosa chert.
In my day job, people sometimes tell me about how Choctaws came from the Mayans or from somewhere in South America, implying, of course, that we don't have a deep heritage. For a cultural person, this is exasperating on multiple levels, but the stones have something to say about it. Clovis technology was used by about ten human generations. Late in the technology's tenure, artisans started making points with indented lateral edges. These points are called "waisted Clovis" or "fishtail Clovis". Wasted Clovis points were made by communities not just in the same areas where the earlier styles of Clovis were made, they were also made by communities living across eastern Central America and down into Venezuela. People were already living in these areas by this time and they had been using a totally different lithic technology for a while. So, the spread of waisted Clovis points shows a north-south movement of technology, and perhaps a movement of people. In fact, the DNA of people using a late-style Clovis technology on the northern Plains matches the DNA of early and modern Indigenous people across Central and South America. Choctaws from Mayans? - Turn those footprints around and move them way back into the past!
The Suwannee/Simpson is an ancient style of projectile point that emphasizes the "fishtail design". These points have a similar flaking style to Clovis, and their makers seem to have used the same flintknapping tool kit. Suwannee/Simpson points have yet to be securely dated archaeologically. At least some of them were made while mammoths were still around. Based on present evidence, it seems most likely they were developed from waisted Clovis. The heartland of the Suwannee/Simpson point is the American Southeast, but they are also found from southern New England, down the eastern seaboard, around the Gulf of Mexico, in eastern Central America, and into Venezuela. Communities living all the way into southern South America began making similar-shaped fishtail-style points. Although similar in shape to the northern examples, they used a different flaking style, suggesting this time that it was ideas, more than people moving. Again, the stones show the spread of cultural influence from the American Southeast into regions farther south, not the other way around.
The ancestors who made Clovis and Suwannee points lived at a time when the planet had been slowly warming for thousands of years as the last Ice Age, known as the Pleistocene, came to an end. As the planet became warmer, summers got hotter, but in many areas, winters also became colder. The uplands became drier and the streams flooded from water melting from glaciers. As the extremes increased, plant and animal communities broke apart with individual species moving to different areas that met their individual climate requirements. Many large animals, like the mammoth, went extinct in the Choctaw homeland. Then, from about 12,850-11,700 years ago the planet experienced another major climate shift known as the Younger Dryas. The rapid, natural melting of the glaciers as the planet warmed dumped huge amounts of cold water into the oceans, altering ocean currents that had stabilized climate. Much of the planet suddenly became a lot colder. These changes had impacts on people.
Two related styles of fishtail points were made in the Choctaw homeland during the Younger Dryas: Beaver Lake and Quad. Quads tend to be wider and thinner. Beaver Lake points tend to be lensatic in cross section. Projectile points from this time period are less common in the Southeast than earlier styles. It's hypothesized this is because the drastic changes in climate and landscape represented challenges dire enough for people that the human population shrunk. Today, the planet's glaciers are again rapidly melting. This time, it's because humanity has dumped 1 trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels. Again, an influx of cold water is shifting ocean currents. We seem to be racing the planet towards the same catastrophic jolt that ancestors faced 12,850 years ago. Are we as resilient as they were?
While communities in the Southeast were transitioning Clovis points into the fishtail styles (Suwanee, Beaver Lake, and Quad), communities living in what is now Missouri and Arkansas were transforming Clovis points into a different style, known as Dalton. Early Dalton points look a lot like Clovis points. As time passed, their makers started finishing them by covering the points' surfaces with pressure flaking - a stark contrast to the bold percussion flaking typical of Clovis. Pressure flaking was often used to serrate the points' edges. Between about 12,200 and 11,200 years ago, communities in MO/AR started using newer forms of Dalton points with box-shaped bases (the calendar dates in this and the following paragraphs come from here). Makers resharpen this new Dalton variant by steeply beveling the point's edges, giving the point a parallelogram cross section as resharpening progressed. This later style of Dalton spread across the east between 12,450 and 11,950 years ago, replacing the earlier Quad and Beaver Lake styles. Whether the new form of Dalton developed in the east or MO/AR cannot be determined from current evidence. A particular, local style of Dalton (var. Cochran), was developed on the middle Tombigbee, right in Choctaw country. This form was serrated, but unlike western forms, resharpening happened on both edges of the blade, so a bevel was not created. Over time, Dalton artists would replace the box-shaped bases of their points with side notches. By this point in time, the planet was warming again and new plant and animal communities were stabilizing. In the east, the modern whitetail deer became the most important food animal. Dalton points are much more common in Choctaw country than Beaver Lake and Quad, which suggests the human population was on the rise.
Dalton lithic artists were the first in Choctaw country to use Tuscaloosa chert as their primary raw material. They are also the first to use a technology that could change this tough stone into something easier to shape. By exposing the chert cobbles to just the right amount of heat, they could create invisible micro fractures through the stone. After cooling, when this heat-treated stone is chipped, the fracture travels through, rather than around the stone's tiny grains. The result is that heat-treated stone becomes more glassy, chipping with less force. The heat also oxidizes the natural iron in the stone, causing it to turn red. The degree of these changes is determined by how hot the stone is heated. 570 degrees F, makes small, but noticeable changes. Heating Tuscaloosa chert to 1000 degrees turns it a bright red and makes the find-grained cobbles quite glassy (the chalky cobbles stay chalky, despite heat-treating). The red color change is significant culturally for a weapon that is intended to shed blood. Heat-treating makes Tuscaloosa chert easier to shape, but it also makes for finished tools that are less durable than the ones made from raw stone. When Dalton lithic artists heat-treated stone at all, they did it lightly, making it slightly more reasonable to chip, but not giving up a ton of durability. Over the next 12,000 years, the communities in the Choctaw homeland would heat treat Tuscaloosa chert with increasing frequency and to increasing temperatures. In the centuries before European contact, the Choctaw ancestors were heat-treating the Tuscaloosa chert that they used to make arrow points right up to the stone's structural limits.
Communities in the east soon developed new styles of side-notched points, such as Cache River and Big Sandy that replaced side-notched Dalton forms locally 11,600-11,400 years ago. Spreading from east-to-west, the new side-notched styles had replaced Dalton points even in the MO/AR heartland by 9,950 years ago.
San Patrice points are contemporary with Dalton points. They were made by communities living in a broad arc, spanning from north-Central Oklahoma, down through Texas, Louisiana, and across the southern part of Choctaw homeland and transitioning to other forms like Hardaway, made my communities living all the way to the East Coast. The San Patrice point form had first appeared somewhere around 12,400 years ago. It has been hypothesized that this style was
developed from the famous Folsom point on the Great Plains. San Patrice points tend to be thin
and heavily pressure flaked. The points that I have seen are made from raw, or possibly very lightly heat-treated stone. The design of San Patrice sort of followed the same trajectory as the Dalton, morphing from a gently wasted form with a long hafting area to a side or corner-notched form with a shorter haft through time. Most of the San Patrice points found in Mississippi are these later variants: St. Johns (side-notched) and Leaf River (corner-notched). The latter derives its name from one of the major streams in Choctaw county. At the Big Eddy Archaeological site in Missouri, people making San Patrice and Dalton points occupied opposite ends of the same campsite at the same time. It would be interesting to know the stories they shared.
As time passed, artisans in the Choctaw homeland made different styles of corner-notched projectile points. Kirk and Hardin are two of the most iconic. Both were sometimes made with bold flake scars shearing across both faces, which suggests a punch technology. Hardin points are distinctive for the sharpness of the angle at the end of the notch and some Kirk points stand out for the depth of their notches. I've been able to accomplish both in tough stone only with the aid of a punch notching tool made from a deer antler. Hardin points were made by communities across a vast area spanning from the Great Lakes south to the Gulf Coast. The style of Hardin point made in Choctaw country is the southern Hardin. Its range extends from eastern Kentucky to Mobile Bay.
Around 9,000 years ago, many communities started focusing on making large-sized blades. In Choctaw country, artisans made these from big slabs of Tallahatta sandstone and exported these to other regions. Big blades are, of course, impossible to make from small pieces of Tuscaloosa chert gravel. When the focus changed, the level of workmanship that was put into tools made of Tuscaloosa chert changed. The average projectile point from the periods known to archaeologists as the Middle Archaic through middle Woodland, made of easily chipped heat-treated Tuscaloosa chert, is thick, stubby, and seems to have been quickly roughly into shape using a hammerstone. You can see examples here. Many look like they would bounce off of a deer. Perhaps many were used as cutting tools, rather than spear tips. I dont currently know. I do know these tool styles and the people using them were successful, as these later styles are abundant across Choctaw county. Despite a general decrease in workmanship, there were still skilled flintknappers in every past generation. This post's cover photo is an embellished Late Archaic Barbed point, a style from roughly the same time Choctaw county was involved in long-distance trade with the Poverty Point site to the west (4,000-2,500 years ago).
Around AD 700, the bow and arrow came into Choctaw country. This new weapons system had a higher rate of fire and involved less game-scaring motion than the atl-atl. Choctaw oral tradition describes the arrival of the bow and arrow as a supernatural gift from God. One of the last styles of projectile points made for the atl-atl in Choctaw country and across much the Southeast and Midwest is the Gary point and its local varieties.
Arrows are lighter weight than atl-atl darts and, thus, have much less momentum for punching a stone point into a target. Although sharp, the rough edge of the stone causes friction that limits penetration. To overcome this, arrow points were made much smaller than the earlier point styles had been, and they were made to have thin, narrow tips. The much smaller point sizes made heat-treated Tuscaloosa chert an ideal raw material.
Tuscaloosa chert gravel - so important to the early Choctaw ancestors - holds knowledge about deep Choctaw history and details about Indigenous ways of living that are not commonly known in the 21st century. Studying the old points is an opportunity to learn from this stone in a way that can bring out details from deep Choctaw history that don't appear in most history books. Making tools from it is an opportunity to learn from this stone about some parts of Choctaw culture that have been sleeping in a way that can be used to reawaken them. Using tools made of Tusaloosa chert is an opportunity to learn from the stone that gives you Indigenous life experiences that are very different from those of the dominant society around us, today. At Nan Awaya Farm, a the Choctaw Nation Labor Day Festival flintknapping class, and among a few flintknappers on the Mississippi Choctaw Reservation, Tuscaloosa chert is again being used to write a few new Choctaw stories.
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