A Projectile Point Guide for The Upper Mississippi River Valley

The most common relics of the 12,000-year occupancy of the Upper Mississippi River Valley may be the chipped stone projectile points that Native Americans fastened to the ends of their spears, darts, and arrow shafts. This useful guide provides a key to identifying the various styles of points found along the Upper Mississippi River in the Driftless region stretching roughly from Dubuque, Iowa, to Red Wing, Minnesota, but framed within a somewhat larger area extending from the Rock Island Rapids at the modern Moline-Rock Island area to the Falls of St. Anthony at Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Logging tens of thousands of miles and visiting private collectors from all walks of life since 1982, Robert Boszhardt has documented thousands of projectile points found in this region. In addition to drawings of each style, he provides other accepted names as well as names of related points, age, distribution, a description (including length and width), material, and references for each type. The guide is meant for the many avocational archaeologists who collect projectile points in the Upper Midwest and will be a useful reference tool for professional field archaeologists as well.

Emphasizing the preservation of sites as well as a mutual exchange of information between professional and avocational archaeologists, this guide will reveal projectile points as clues to the past, time markers which embody crucial information about the cultures of the Mississippi River Valley's early inhabitants.

Robert “Ernie” Boszhardt is associate director, contracts director, and regional archaeologists at the U of Wisconsin-La Crosse Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center. He has directed numerous surveys and excavations in the Upper Mississippi River area over many years. With James L. Theler, he is the author of Twelve Millennia: Archaeology of the Upper Mississippi River Valley (Iowa, 2003).