Editor’s note: “Dispatches” are occasional snapshots of people, places, scenes or moments from around Georgia that our reporters come across. They aren’t always tied to a news event.
MACON — On a recent day Robin Barker, the lead interpretive ranger of Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park, happened through the lobby and was asked by a visitor to describe what he considered to be one of its most precious remnants.
“The white point in that case right there,” said Barker, motioning to the spear tip discovered here on Macon’s east side in the summer of 1935 during what was and remains the largest archaeological dig in U.S. history.
The cream-colored shard of hand-carved stone stands out. As it should. It is a significant artifact. The once-sharpened rock was part of a spear tip likely used by a mammoth hunter who was among the earliest humans to set foot in the Southeast.
The distinctive spear point, the few-inch-long piece of it that survived, has long been on prominent display at this park, known for its mounds, which were built about 1,000 years ago by Native American members of the Mississippian culture that flourished here.
The relic, from a far earlier time and now encased in a plastic cover, hangs on a wall in the center’s entry rotunda. Amid murals and timelines depicting this region’s earliest inhabitants, it is, not unlike the park itself, a touchstone to the past.
It was discovered when a Roosevelt-era program sent more than 800 workers to excavate the ancient site on what are now park grounds. Until then, narrowing the time of human arrival in these parts had been something of a guessing game.
“It changed the entire narrative of North American archaeology,” Barker said. “Before that, people didn’t have any evidence of people living in the South, or really in the East prior to that era.”
The discovery of the so-called Clovis point, or spear tip, provided proof that people had migrated this far east sometime around 9,000 B.C.
“It was one of those paradigm shifts in archaeology. … It turned the whole field on its head,” Barker said.
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
A book published in 2018, “Ocmulgee National Monument: A Brief History with Field Notes,” articulated the significance of the spear point’s 1935 discovery: “It proved the antiquity of human occupation on the Macon Plateau.”
The book further mentioned that Clovis points were named for the New Mexico town where the first such “fluted stone point” like it was found six years before the one unearthed here in 1935.
According to the book, the one in Macon, dug up near the historical site’s Council Chamber, was found by “an unnamed laborer” working with a team of archaeologists and is considered “one of the most important finds ever to be unearthed at Ocmulgee.”
Middle Georgia State history professor Matthew Jennings, who co-wrote the book, said recently that the importance of the 1935 find is “kind of hard to overstate, to be frank. … It moves back the timeline for human occupation in the Southeast by a long, long time.”
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