Part of last week’s post was about the stone tools found by Gerald Penney during his survey of the SW coast of the Island that he called the Katalisk survey. I shared the post and received a couple of questions about the material the tools were made from. The questions got me thinking about lithic sources and I realized for all the posts I’ve done over the years that in some way dealt with stone tools I’ve never talked about where the stone for those tools comes from.
This post will deal with lithic sources on the Island. I guess I should explain that lithic simply means stone, or made of stone. So lithic sources simply means stone sources. In this case, sources for material that are knapped (or flaked) to make stone tools, arrowheads, spearheads, knives, and other tools. In most cases, that kind of material on the Island consists of chert, jasper or rhyolite. Chert and jasper (tends to be bright red) are sedimentary rocks unlike rhyolite, which is an igneous rock. All three will break in a way that, if you are experienced, you can control and break or flake into stone tools.
There is another type of stone tool manufacturing known as pecking and grinding for groundstone tools. It is usually applied to slate and slate-like stone but I will deal with that in another post.
In my opinion, stone tools on the Island can range wildly in flaking quality from the beautiful almost jewel-like serrated Groswater Pre-Inuit harpoon end-blades from Phillip’s Garden West, near Port au Chiox to more rough and ready for use material such as the Little Passage Beothuk ancestor arrowheads from Bonavista Bay (see below).
The material for these stone tools comes from various places on the Island. The Groswater material in the photo above most likely came from the beaches in Cow Head where cobbles of very fine-grained chert were picked up on the beach by the Groswater culture people. The chert in this area tends to be red to brown in colour and contains micro-fossils of something called Radiolaria which are protozoa of diameter 0.1–0.2 mm that have become fossilized in deep water mud that becomes bedrock. The radiolaria look like small black dots in the chert.
The material for the Little Passage artifacts likely came from the Port au Port Peninsula. The chert there is in large beds and cobbles and is usually grey with some swirls of lighter, darker, or bluish-grey throughout it. The photo below comes from a colleague who wrote a post about lithic collecting on the west coast and in central Newfoundland.
In the second part of his post, he talks about lithic collecting in the Botwood area but there are actually several places in central where flakable stone material is found. In 1981 Dr. Ralph Pastore found what he thought was glacially deposited, but culturally modified (meaning modified by people) chert boulders scattered along the beach in Bridger Cove. As it turns out my colleague, Ken Reynolds re-visited the site in 2006 and described it as having multiple chert outcrops along about a half kilometre of the beach as well as numerous areas of cultural modification throughout the beach and tidal zone. Therefore, the boulders Ralph saw in 1981 were not glacially deposited but rather part of chert outcrops in the bedrock. The chert outcrops were found again to the northwest at Chanceport. Ken believed these deposits were even larger and that both locales were an important chert and possibly jasper source for stone tools.
A large outcrop of jasper sits on the side of the road to Harry’s Harbour, last year a colleague and I stopped to take some photos while in the area. My colleague noticed the outcrop years ago while doing his doctoral thesis on the Dorset soapstone quarry in Fleur de Lys. He also ran a MUN archaeology field school on the Baie Verte Peninsula from 2002 until 2007. During the excavation of a Pre-Inuit site in Coachman’s Cove, they found a beautiful jasper stone tool and numerous jasper flakes (Flakes are created when making stone tools, like sawdust when cutting wood) that he believes might be made from the Harry’s Harbour source.
Rhyolite is another lithic type that can be flaked into tools. The main source for this material is probably the Bloody Bay quarry site in Bonavista Bay. There are numerous rhyolite outcrops in the area but the main quarry is entire the side of a very large hill that is literally covered in pieces of rhyolite broken off the bedrock by people for thousands of years. Perhaps the most stunning collection of artifacts to be made from Bloody Bay rhyolite is a cache of 32 stone tools found on Change Islands by a local woman and her partner while waiting for the ferry. We know the Change Islands biface cache is made of Bloody Bay rhyolite because it was examined chemically and compared to flake from the Bloody Bay quarry.
I know of at least two more types of distinctive stone used for stone tools but in those cases that we do not know where the chert beds are located. There is a grey to white chert found on several Northern Peninsula and Southern Labrador sites that, while I worked in Bird Cove in the late 90s, we took to calling Bird Cove chert. This material is rather distinctive because it often has little square holes in it where crystals have eroded out of the material. Since my time in Bird Cove, I have seen this material in many other Northern Peninsula and Southern Labrador site collections. I am convinced the source for the material is in Southern Labrador so the nickname ‘Bird Cove chert’ is likely not accurate.
Another well-known lithic material found on Newfoundland archaeology sites is something archaeologists refer to as Trinity Bay chert because it is most often found on sites in the Trinity-Placentia Bays area. Most of the time it is used by Pre-Inuit groups, particularly the Dorset at sites like Stock Cove outside Sunnyside. Trinity Bay chert is white, but that is just the colour of the outer weathered layer of stone. When a flake of the material is broken it is actually grey on the inside. Huge quantities of this material have been found at sites like Stock Cove but we do not have a location for the source of that material.
Undoubtedly, there are many other sources for such tools on the Island than those considered in this post.
Curtis, Jenneth
2009 TNP-2008-1511 Final Report Archaeological Excavations at the Bank Site, Terra Nova National Park.
Renouf, Priscilla
1999 Ancient Cultures, Bountiful Seas.
INSIDE NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR ARCHAEOLOGY 
Really enjoyed reading this. Thanks for posting.
Thnaks Leonard.