ABSTRACT
Current projectile point studies address function, manufacturing technology, performance efficiency, hunting strategies, and social boundaries. Central to all these efforts and to the larger goal of explaining the evolution of projectile technology is the accurate ordering of points in time and the documentation of patterns in temporal variation. The use of existing projectile chronologies to simultaneously order points and examine temporal variation, however, is circular and many problems inherent in projectile point chronologies argue against the use of projectile point types. An examination of the prevalent assumptions involved in dating projectile points by association and by typological cross-dating indicates that current techniques are flawed but that an alternative strategy, using thermoluminescence (TL), may be profitably applied to this problem. In this strategy, TL is applied directly to individual points that were catastrophically heated during prehistoric manufacture. Although there are a number of technical problems with using TL to date projectile points, the results of this technique suggest that it is possible to build interval-level age associations for projectile points. Significantly, this provides an accurate way to document temporal variation and this is critical for building an evolutionary explanation of projectile technology.
