I found this Kirk knife it looks like it was reworked on the base material looks like gray cochocton!
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I found a Kirk knife!
- Thread starter choo
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joshuaream
Silver Member
Cool find, I must have missed this thread the first time around.
Your kirk is a great example of something that I have noticed many times over the years. When you compare two relatively similarly aged Early Archaic pieces like Dovetails and Kirks, you see a huge difference in how the points were used and curated by their original owners.
Kirks are often made from local materials, chewed up, resharpened haphazardly and used to the point of being almost deformed and crooked by the time they were discarded. They used every ounce of flint & cutting edge in many of them. You see a lot of variety in form around the region where they are found. You'll see a lot of nice ones as well, but the heavily used ones are very heavily used.
Dovetails are frequently imported or higher quality/colorful materials, they tend to show a lot more methodical resharpening which preserves the outline or balance. When they get used up they are often down to a drill like form. There are clearly a couple of styles of dove (button base, hip roof, large base, notched base, etc.) but they are all pretty consistently recognizable as a dovetail. Some were rode hard and put away wet, but usually they show a degree of care a bit like a fine tool vs the harbor freight discount bin special.
Your kirk is a great example of something that I have noticed many times over the years. When you compare two relatively similarly aged Early Archaic pieces like Dovetails and Kirks, you see a huge difference in how the points were used and curated by their original owners.
Kirks are often made from local materials, chewed up, resharpened haphazardly and used to the point of being almost deformed and crooked by the time they were discarded. They used every ounce of flint & cutting edge in many of them. You see a lot of variety in form around the region where they are found. You'll see a lot of nice ones as well, but the heavily used ones are very heavily used.
Dovetails are frequently imported or higher quality/colorful materials, they tend to show a lot more methodical resharpening which preserves the outline or balance. When they get used up they are often down to a drill like form. There are clearly a couple of styles of dove (button base, hip roof, large base, notched base, etc.) but they are all pretty consistently recognizable as a dovetail. Some were rode hard and put away wet, but usually they show a degree of care a bit like a fine tool vs the harbor freight discount bin special.
uniface
Silver Member
Yep. Threre was a dominant people who controlled access to the good stuff and made/traded Plevna cluster stuff of it. Kirk Cluster stuff is made of whatever local materials were available to locals (not always bad but not flintridge &c.).
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