This looks like any one of hundreds or thousands of arrowheads I’ve seen from there US southwest. There are places you can go and just look at the surface and find these all over the place. Its quartz crystal, but if you know where to look, quartz is all over the place, literally littering the ground. This head would be for small game (quail, rabbit, and maybe as big as deer). Other common materials might be flint, or jasper or obsidian, really anything around that can be knapped and hold an edge.
A good way to think of these would be as a “semi-disposable” part of a toolkit, not at all dissimilar to how modern hunters who use bows think of arrows and arrowheads. You would probably try to recover these whenever possible, but if you lost it and had to spend too much time getting your arrow back, you carry backups.
Silicate minerals make sharp edges, pure-er silicates are clear. Makes sense. Around my parts we have obsidian arrowheads, some jet black, some rainbow and some with reddish brown clouds/stripes. We also have great jaspers, cherts and the like, but obsidian was clearly greatly favored.
Yeah. In southern California there is some obsidian, but the mountains are almost all granite, so quarts is far more common.
And if you go far enough east into the desert you get into really weird pockets of metamorphics, and I’ve seen some crazy arrowheads and other tools (scrapers etc) from all kinds of weird materials.
This looks like any one of hundreds or thousands of arrowheads I’ve seen from there US southwest. There are places you can go and just look at the surface and find these all over the place. Its quartz crystal, but if you know where to look, quartz is all over the place, literally littering the ground. This head would be for small game (quail, rabbit, and maybe as big as deer). Other common materials might be flint, or jasper or obsidian, really anything around that can be knapped and hold an edge.
A good way to think of these would be as a “semi-disposable” part of a toolkit, not at all dissimilar to how modern hunters who use bows think of arrows and arrowheads. You would probably try to recover these whenever possible, but if you lost it and had to spend too much time getting your arrow back, you carry backups.
Silicate minerals make sharp edges, pure-er silicates are clear. Makes sense. Around my parts we have obsidian arrowheads, some jet black, some rainbow and some with reddish brown clouds/stripes. We also have great jaspers, cherts and the like, but obsidian was clearly greatly favored.
Yeah. In southern California there is some obsidian, but the mountains are almost all granite, so quarts is far more common.
And if you go far enough east into the desert you get into really weird pockets of metamorphics, and I’ve seen some crazy arrowheads and other tools (scrapers etc) from all kinds of weird materials.