Spanish? Bolt for small fowl hunting crossbow?

[dana_w]

This small point appears to be made of copper. It was excavated in St. Augustine Florida. I have never seen anything like it, but it doesn't look Indian (Native American) to me. Could it be Spanish? Maybe a bolt for something like a small fowl hunting crossbow?

1.23", 31.242mm
.345", 8.763mm
.27" dia, 6.858mm dia
1/8oz, 3.5g

The photos are copyright (c) 2014 by Dana K. Williams

[fernando]

Hi Dana
I take it that you are sure that this bronze piece was excavated in Florida.
Judging by its forms and patina, i woud presume it is way (extremely?) older than the Spanish arrival in America. Bolts from the 14-16th century didn't have such smooth (harmoneous) lines and were usualy made of iron ... and would hardly have such fantastic patina.
If it weren't for the Florida provenance, i would within my ignorance guess that this would be an object of the bronze age ... you know, the (so often faked) Luristan type of stuff.
But i am just playing the smart

.

[dana_w]

Originally Posted by fernando

Hi Dana
I take it that you are sure that this bronze piece was excavated in Florida.
Judging by its forms and patina, i woud presume it is way (extremely?) older than the Spanish arrival in America. Bolts from the 14-16th century didn't have such smooth (harmoneous) lines and were usualy made of iron ... and would hardly have such fantastic patina.
If it weren't for the Florida provenance, i would within my ignorance guess that this would be an object of the bronze age ... you know, the Luristan type of stuff.
But i am just playing the smart

.

You are so right Fernando, it is a puzzle. You never know were something really came from even if you find it yourself. A friend tells me he dug this up during the late 60s in St Augustine Florida. My father purchased it from him and it ended up in my collection.

There are Indian copper artifacts from North America, but it doesn't resemble any of those that I have found so far.
see: http://copperculture.homestead.com/

[dana_w]

What this piece seems to resemble most are the 1st-3rd century bronze arrowheads made by the Romans and Greeks.

[Shakethetrees]

Here's a Bronze Age point from Chinese tomb sentinel I picked up in china.

Note the rough similarity to the St. Augustine bronze point.

I think a lot of Bronze Age and later bronze points have closely related forms due to parallel development. Similar weapons and utilitarian objects often develop independently but unrelated geographically or culturally.

The fact that form follows function will dictate this evolution, not to mention manufacture technique. The more complex an object becomes, the more room for deviation from simple function. An arrow point needs to be simple to mass produce. Mass production dictates uniformity. Once this is determined, a production method of one kind or another is chosen: cast, wrought, knapped, or other.

Before the rise of machine assisted production, i.e. tool and die forging, templates and jigs assisting in maintaining uniformity, forging was accomplished by contractors with hammer and anvil either as cottage work or in arsenals. Either way, the skill and abilities of the smith determined loosely the degree of accuracy each finished point had.

As a parallel, look at early hand wrought nails. Same idea as far as the numbers required and the method of manufacture. Size and shank diameter, length and type of head are roughly consistent, but if you study a hundred or a thousand, there will be variations across the spectrum of a given type.

So if a wrought iron or steel point is of a style generally associated with a time period or geographical location, there will be many slight deviations in form recognized in the study of a hundred, or a thousand points.

Knapping flint or chert arrowheads is even further back in the evolution of technology. A Folsom point will look generally like the next one, but slight variations in the position and shape of each flaked facet will bear infinite variation.

Casting leaves the least room for variation.

A master pattern of wood metal or other material is made. From this pattern single use molds are made, in clay, plaster, sand or other heat resistant workable material.

From one individual master pattern thousands of finished points are cast. Each bears the identical form, subtleties and all.

One slight, and I do mean slight, variation among many cast and finished points done from the same pattern comes from the hand finishing that each undergoes before mounting. There will always be sprues to remove, flashings to file or stone off, edges to sharpen. Here the craftsman is following the form set in manufacture. The other is caused by slight imperfections where the metal does not fully fill the mold, but not so bad at the point is rejected.

The "point" I'm trying to make here is that the location of the find for something as simple as man arrowhead is important if you are certain that the technology matches uniquely one culture that occupied that area. If you have many cultures all sharing reasonably close technological abilities that all crossed a given geographical area, good luck tying a particular point to one or the other group, unless it is found with strong evidence supporting one group or the other.

[dana_w]

Thanks for your comments Shakethetrees. I know you are right, form follows function. I just don't think there were any natives using bronze in Florida.

A friend of mine speculates that this relic may have traveled here the way many Roman coins have, via ballast stones.

There are many stories of such finds, but I haven't found a good article on the subject.... Yet!

http://themonticellonews.com/ancient...p11110-115.htm

[Raf]

Hi Dana
You friends theory about ships ballast is certainly credible . Ivor Noel Hume ; All the best Rubbish . Victor Gollance Ltd 1974. ( a delightful book ) quotes a Roman Sestarius of the Emperor Nero found near Bennets Point Maryland and a South Italian coin of around 300 BC found amongst other colonial rubbish on an estuary near to the eighteenth century town of Woodstock , North Carolina . The author who is an established archaeologist concludes that the poor condition / low numismatic interest of the coins made it unlikely for them to have been lost by some eighteenth century colonial collector. As evidence of the ballast theory he cites a nineteenth century wreck investigated in 1972 near Jacksonville , Florida which revealed large quantities of rubbish dating from the fifteenth to nineteenth century . The implication was that the ballast came originally from dredging of the Thames in London but the same could presumably said for any port trading regularly with the Americas.

[Matchlock]

Great find, Dana,


And extremely rare as well, especially as it consists of some copper alloy (presumably brass rather than bronze).

I fully agree with you and Nando on the dating and provenance of this head.
To me, though, it seems to be the head of a whistling crossbow bolt (German: Heulbolzen), or of an arrow for a bow:
http://www.google.de/imgres?imgurl=h...d=0CPwBEK0DMEY

The photos attached depict the only European whistling crossbow bolt known to be preserved completely, retaining its original haft; German, 14th-16th c.; it is in the private collection linked below.

My congrats!

Should you ever consider selling it, the highly specialized collection of a good Bavarian friend of mine would greatly welcome it, and provide a good home for it. For decades to come:
http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showth...bow+collection


Best,
Michael

[kronckew]

here's what they look like new. i know a guy who casts these in the UK for re-enacters.

[JamesKelly]

You might get some useful information on this piece if you can get an X-ray Fluoroscope analysis. The process leaves no marks at all on the object. On your piece one would analyze that crusty scale in several places. There is no need to grind off the scale to clean metal, though if you're not watching a laboratory guy might do so.

Look for tin and arsenic, along with whatever else is there (maybe silver, antimony, lead). One that I used to have access to is the Innov-X Systems Model #XT-245S spectrometer. My employer used it to analyze the specialty nickel alloys which they sold. I understand this, or similar devices, is also to determine authenticity of old oil paintings, based on what metallic elements are in the paint.

The reason for such analysis would be that European bronze age weapons were cast of copper alloyed with a few percent, maybe 5 to 15%, of tin. The tin is what turned copper into bronze. Much of the tin used was mined in England.

South American bronze, to my fuzzy recollection, used arsenic rather than tin, to harden the copper.

I do not know what typical minor elements are present in native copper, such as we have here in Michigan. Such information, European and Inca (also Aztec, I suppose) bronze, native copper analyses, should be available with some searching.

During the conquest of Mexico Cortéz' men used the arquebus and crossbow in roughly similar quantities. When they ran out of gunpowder, well the musketeers weren't much use. However they set their Indian allies to making crossbow bolts, thousands of them, from copper which was available to them.

I got this from The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico 1517 - 1521, by Bernal Díaz del Castillo. I quote: p274: ". . . long lances . . .and, as they possessed much copper, to make for each one two metal points." p383 " . . . and over five loads of arrow heads made of copper, so that we could always make more arrows . . ." p391: " . . . Cortéz sent to advise all the friendly pueblos near Texcoco to make eight thousand arrow heads of copper in each pueblo . . ."

I would think your arrow head of sufficient archaeological interest that some local university would do the analyses.

Ahh, but your personal body must be present in any laboratory that might do the analyses. I know that as an American you speak English, and you probably believe that the laboratory technicians do as well. Not so. It may sound like English, but I can assure you from long personal experience that they absolutely speak a different language. There will be no respect for the antiquity of your item, and this includes amongst the archaeologists. One or the other will happily grind off an area to bright metal, or even slice it in half to get a better metallurgical analyses. Yes, even an archaeologist cannot be trusted not to destroy the item. I promise you this is so. You yourself must personally be within reach of the item. Neither the professors nor the graduate students mean any harm, they simply have no concept of its personal value to you.

However if you can get a non-destructive chemical analysis then one might delve further into the literature to determine its meaning. i have some papers on old copper alloys but have not read them in years. In Michigan it is possible I might get some native copper from our peninsula & get it analyzed where I used to work. They have done a nice job for me on 19th century bronze firearms parts. Also they sort of need my experience these days. Michigan copper may not be Aztec copper but it is a start.

All this to determine if some Aztec made it in the 16th century, or whether it came along much earlier with those bearded guys from the direction of the sunrise.

I am a retired metallurgist who, in his young life almost became an archaeologist. I have some interest in historical metallurgy.

[fernando]

Great material, James