4 ms·

Why did Clovis toolmakers choose difficult quartz crystal?

51 points by PaulHoule 6mo ago

mring33621 6mo ago
Because it looks cool!
- AngryData 6mo ago
  This is what I would bet on. If you spent decades of your life knapping various "easy" and ideal stones for tools and getting quite skilled at it, it doesn't seem like much of a stretch for them to try knapping a "difficult" stone just because it looks cooler and you can show it off.
- moscoe 6mo ago
  Exactly. Same reason kids and people today are drawn to it and gems in general. Even today, people imbue crystals with mystical properties.
  - pixl97 6mo ago
    Not just people. Many bird species collect 'novel' items when making nests to attract mates. In birds we think this may be a means for a mate to measure the fitness of the male, that is they have the resources, intelligence, and ability to find these novel items, then it's likely they'll be a good father to their offspring. It doesn't seem far fetched that this started from a similar place in humans, but has been wildly adapted in the time since as our abilities grew and the complexity of our society increased. Very hard to prove any thing like this though.
vintermann 6mo ago
I'm always suspicious of "it was religious" claims in archeology.
- defrost 6mo ago
  Neither the article nor the backing paper discussed made any such definite claim. Many casual readers confuse statements such as "which *may* have had symbolic or ritual significance." with meaning "this absolutely had to do with (a) religion" when no such thing is intended. Attribution of potential cause of inferred behaviour to "ritual" is a long standing practice in archaeology; it's code for "we don't know" and covers all manner of things that may simply have developed as habit over years, may have unknown and non supernatural causes / motivations, etc.
  - sandworm101 6mo ago
    Ritual may also have practical/non-supernatural motivations that were simply incorrect. We do lots of things that we think are good practical things that, years later, we learn were mistakes. Uranium and radiation as a cure-all was a mistake. Dig up a 1950s house and one might think the uranium devices were kept for "ritual" when in fact they were kept for thier mistaken health benefits.
  - vikramkr 6mo ago
    For examples from more recent history think giant scissors used for ribbon cutting ceremonies, the golden spike used to signal completion of the intercontinental railroad, or like all the stuff related to militaries like changing of the guard that are ceremonial. Or even something like leaving a celebratory emoji on the first or merged by a new hire or a box of donuts on someone's birthday. Or bringing out the champagne after closing on a house. Theres just a ton of ritual in day to day life, and even more surrounding big high impact moments that might leave behind a bunch of artifacts like weddings and funerals
- chrisco255 6mo ago
  It is like the go to explanation for things they don't have an answer to. What if the quartz arrow head was just a status symbol or was traded as a luxury item?
  - fhars 6mo ago
lexicality 6mo ago
Given I've spent the last few weeks teaching myself CAD and completely designing a custom 3d printed racking system for my consumer networking gear from scratch, I would like to think that "I decided to do this ostensibly stupid and pointlessly difficult thing for a minor aesthetic improvement even when a blatantly easier (and possibly better) option is available" is a valid reason for humans to do things. Besides, that green quartz crystal is beautiful. If you can only afford to carry a limited number of objects then I personally would try to find a way to turn it into an object I can hold, use, and admire every day.
- jaapz 6mo ago
  When future humans find your cad files they are going to wonder why you would do it like this, and then probably settle on religious reasons
christkv 6mo ago
There goes Peter with his fancy quartz points does he think he is better than us?
- pixl97 6mo ago
  ? There goes Peter with his fancy quartz points does he think he is better than us?, let's beat him to death and take it. Crap, I just wrote the bible.
ungreased0675 6mo ago
Why do the Swiss people continue to make timepieces in the difficult mechanical form, when making quartz movements would be easier and cheaper? Must be religious reasons. Maybe they serve a purpose in rituals by Swiss shaman. Anthropologists have no creativity.
- jstanley 6mo ago
  > may have had symbolic or ritual significance. I think is a fair description of Swiss mechanical watches. They are certainly not of practical significance.
  - 3RTB297 6mo ago
    That's the point of the comment, humans do things all the time that aren't part of some larger cultural-ritual-religious aspect. We spend a lot of time and resources doing things that seem cool at the time and only seem cool to a few people. Someone spends a few hours doing a large tag mural under a freeway and it's not a painting to honor the gods because that spot on the freeway gets sun at a certain time of day. There's often practical reasons people do things that anthropologists can incorrectly attribute to something larger.
    - pixl97 6mo ago
      A deep curiosity is a behavior many people have (but not all). We try all kinds of things and some of them 'catch' socially. Many bird species have behaviors like this. Birds (especially things like corvidae) will pick up a new behavior in an area, and you can track the spread of the behavior radiating outward to new areas as more members of the species pick it up from each other. The sentence "Survival of the fittest" isn't exactly true, the more accurate description would be "Survival of the fit enough". Curiosity itself is a means to explore the problem space of reality. If you're not curious then changes in your environment may leave you unable to adapt. If you're too curious then you can end up in situations where it removes members of your species faster than they can breed. Even after the point of the individual learning something new it doesn't do much for the existing members of your species. The most optimal outcome seems like some sort of cautious mimesis transfer. In the same idea as "monkey see, monkey do", there doesn't have to be a why, other than it doesn't harm the prime directive of stay alive, get more food, breed. That is, these quartz arrowheads are a very early version of a meme.
lovemenot 6mo ago
Could it be that relatively few quartz arrowheads were made, but that disproportionately many of them survived to have been subsequently discovered? Survivorship bias.
dboreham 6mo ago
The original paper and referencing article are paywalled so I'm not sure if this is mentioned there, but the answer to the question "why did they use XXX for arrow points?" is surely answered by putting yourself in the position of "them" and thinking about how you'd get material for your arrows. No Amazon, no Home Depot. You'd wander around in your environment looking for suitable material. There are many places around where I live where the regular rock is soft (sandstone) but there are deposits of quartz here and there (no idea why, but there is a whole federal park devoted to the phenomenon[1]). So if you lived in such an area you'd use quartz because it's the only available usable material. Only once long distance trade routes/gathering expeditions were a thing, people used material from further away. E.g. there are examples of obsidian from a specific location in Yellowstone being found up to a thousand miles away[2]. [1] https://www.fs.usda.gov/r01/beaverhead-deerlodge/recreation/crystal-park-picnic-and-mineral-collection-area https://www.fs.usda.gov/r01/beaverhead-deerlodge/recreation/... [2] https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/historyculture/obsidiancliff.htm https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/historyculture/obsidiancliff....
DoctorOetker 6mo ago
perhaps the purpose was didactic: when a child gets interested or wants to help those tribe members making stone tools, it is not yet aware of difficulty levels of different materials. teaching a newcomer to make a proper tool from a more annoying material, may make their skills more robust when relaxing to easier materials later on. think of all the skills you had to learn in your own education, and how little of it you actually use today, or at least how little you think you use of it today.
- dwroberts 6mo ago
  Idea reminds me of these kinds of objects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_cup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_cup
dtj1123 6mo ago
I would hypothesize that rather than utilizing quartz for religious reasons or because quartz has favorable mechanical properties, the underlying motivation may have been that the resulting tools look sick as fuck.
bokohut 5mo ago
I was out on my daily artifact walk when this was literally posted a few days ago and during that walk I found two broken slightly translucent quartz spear points. Since they were broken they did not make it into my display case next to the whole quartz points but they did make it into my broken relics buckets. Having located more than a thousand native artifacts in the last 14 years of walking I can personally confirm that holding such a visual object in one's own hand causes the mind the ponder and thoughts to roam as the light glistens back into ones eyes. These quartz points also stand alone in appearance next to all my other relics except for the uniques and the perfects. From the comments too as well I will add that while I have no concrete proof what purpose they served, security or religion, they certainly could kill if used via an atlatl.

51 points by PaulHoule 6mo ago

mring33621 6mo ago

Because it looks cool!

AngryData 6mo ago
This is what I would bet on. If you spent decades of your life knapping various "easy" and ideal stones for tools and getting quite skilled at it, it doesn't seem like much of a stretch for them to try knapping a "difficult" stone just because it looks cooler and you can show it off.
moscoe 6mo ago
Exactly. Same reason kids and people today are drawn to it and gems in general. Even today, people imbue crystals with mystical properties.
- pixl97 6mo ago
  Not just people. Many bird species collect 'novel' items when making nests to attract mates. In birds we think this may be a means for a mate to measure the fitness of the male, that is they have the resources, intelligence, and ability to find these novel items, then it's likely they'll be a good father to their offspring. It doesn't seem far fetched that this started from a similar place in humans, but has been wildly adapted in the time since as our abilities grew and the complexity of our society increased. Very hard to prove any thing like this though.

vintermann 6mo ago

I'm always suspicious of "it was religious" claims in archeology.

defrost 6mo ago
Neither the article nor the backing paper discussed made any such definite claim. Many casual readers confuse statements such as "which *may* have had symbolic or ritual significance." with meaning "this absolutely had to do with (a) religion" when no such thing is intended. Attribution of potential cause of inferred behaviour to "ritual" is a long standing practice in archaeology; it's code for "we don't know" and covers all manner of things that may simply have developed as habit over years, may have unknown and non supernatural causes / motivations, etc.
- sandworm101 6mo ago
  Ritual may also have practical/non-supernatural motivations that were simply incorrect. We do lots of things that we think are good practical things that, years later, we learn were mistakes. Uranium and radiation as a cure-all was a mistake. Dig up a 1950s house and one might think the uranium devices were kept for "ritual" when in fact they were kept for thier mistaken health benefits.
- vikramkr 6mo ago
  For examples from more recent history think giant scissors used for ribbon cutting ceremonies, the golden spike used to signal completion of the intercontinental railroad, or like all the stuff related to militaries like changing of the guard that are ceremonial. Or even something like leaving a celebratory emoji on the first or merged by a new hire or a box of donuts on someone's birthday. Or bringing out the champagne after closing on a house. Theres just a ton of ritual in day to day life, and even more surrounding big high impact moments that might leave behind a bunch of artifacts like weddings and funerals
chrisco255 6mo ago
It is like the go to explanation for things they don't have an answer to. What if the quartz arrow head was just a status symbol or was traded as a luxury item?
- fhars 6mo ago

lexicality 6mo ago

Given I've spent the last few weeks teaching myself CAD and completely designing a custom 3d printed racking system for my consumer networking gear from scratch, I would like to think that "I decided to do this ostensibly stupid and pointlessly difficult thing for a minor aesthetic improvement even when a blatantly easier (and possibly better) option is available" is a valid reason for humans to do things. Besides, that green quartz crystal is beautiful. If you can only afford to carry a limited number of objects then I personally would try to find a way to turn it into an object I can hold, use, and admire every day.

jaapz 6mo ago
When future humans find your cad files they are going to wonder why you would do it like this, and then probably settle on religious reasons

christkv 6mo ago

There goes Peter with his fancy quartz points does he think he is better than us?

pixl97 6mo ago
? There goes Peter with his fancy quartz points does he think he is better than us?, let's beat him to death and take it. Crap, I just wrote the bible.

ungreased0675 6mo ago

Why do the Swiss people continue to make timepieces in the difficult mechanical form, when making quartz movements would be easier and cheaper? Must be religious reasons. Maybe they serve a purpose in rituals by Swiss shaman. Anthropologists have no creativity.

jstanley 6mo ago
> may have had symbolic or ritual significance. I think is a fair description of Swiss mechanical watches. They are certainly not of practical significance.
- 3RTB297 6mo ago
  That's the point of the comment, humans do things all the time that aren't part of some larger cultural-ritual-religious aspect. We spend a lot of time and resources doing things that seem cool at the time and only seem cool to a few people. Someone spends a few hours doing a large tag mural under a freeway and it's not a painting to honor the gods because that spot on the freeway gets sun at a certain time of day. There's often practical reasons people do things that anthropologists can incorrectly attribute to something larger.
  - pixl97 6mo ago
    A deep curiosity is a behavior many people have (but not all). We try all kinds of things and some of them 'catch' socially. Many bird species have behaviors like this. Birds (especially things like corvidae) will pick up a new behavior in an area, and you can track the spread of the behavior radiating outward to new areas as more members of the species pick it up from each other. The sentence "Survival of the fittest" isn't exactly true, the more accurate description would be "Survival of the fit enough". Curiosity itself is a means to explore the problem space of reality. If you're not curious then changes in your environment may leave you unable to adapt. If you're too curious then you can end up in situations where it removes members of your species faster than they can breed. Even after the point of the individual learning something new it doesn't do much for the existing members of your species. The most optimal outcome seems like some sort of cautious mimesis transfer. In the same idea as "monkey see, monkey do", there doesn't have to be a why, other than it doesn't harm the prime directive of stay alive, get more food, breed. That is, these quartz arrowheads are a very early version of a meme.

lovemenot 6mo ago

Could it be that relatively few quartz arrowheads were made, but that disproportionately many of them survived to have been subsequently discovered? Survivorship bias.

dboreham 6mo ago

The original paper and referencing article are paywalled so I'm not sure if this is mentioned there, but the answer to the question "why did they use XXX for arrow points?" is surely answered by putting yourself in the position of "them" and thinking about how you'd get material for your arrows. No Amazon, no Home Depot. You'd wander around in your environment looking for suitable material. There are many places around where I live where the regular rock is soft (sandstone) but there are deposits of quartz here and there (no idea why, but there is a whole federal park devoted to the phenomenon[1]). So if you lived in such an area you'd use quartz because it's the only available usable material. Only once long distance trade routes/gathering expeditions were a thing, people used material from further away. E.g. there are examples of obsidian from a specific location in Yellowstone being found up to a thousand miles away[2]. [1] https://www.fs.usda.gov/r01/beaverhead-deerlodge/recreation/crystal-park-picnic-and-mineral-collection-area https://www.fs.usda.gov/r01/beaverhead-deerlodge/recreation/... [2] https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/historyculture/obsidiancliff.htm https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/historyculture/obsidiancliff....

DoctorOetker 6mo ago

perhaps the purpose was didactic: when a child gets interested or wants to help those tribe members making stone tools, it is not yet aware of difficulty levels of different materials. teaching a newcomer to make a proper tool from a more annoying material, may make their skills more robust when relaxing to easier materials later on. think of all the skills you had to learn in your own education, and how little of it you actually use today, or at least how little you think you use of it today.

dwroberts 6mo ago
Idea reminds me of these kinds of objects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_cup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_cup

dtj1123 6mo ago

I would hypothesize that rather than utilizing quartz for religious reasons or because quartz has favorable mechanical properties, the underlying motivation may have been that the resulting tools look sick as fuck.

bokohut 5mo ago

I was out on my daily artifact walk when this was literally posted a few days ago and during that walk I found two broken slightly translucent quartz spear points. Since they were broken they did not make it into my display case next to the whole quartz points but they did make it into my broken relics buckets. Having located more than a thousand native artifacts in the last 14 years of walking I can personally confirm that holding such a visual object in one's own hand causes the mind the ponder and thoughts to roam as the light glistens back into ones eyes. These quartz points also stand alone in appearance next to all my other relics except for the uniques and the perfects. From the comments too as well I will add that while I have no concrete proof what purpose they served, security or religion, they certainly could kill if used via an atlatl.