Clovis Points (Source: National Park Service)
It appears the first Indians to occupy Virginia were hunters who traveled widely and interacted often with each other, rather than isolated bands of people who lived separately and avoided contact with others.
How do we know that? Our best clue is the tools used by the hunters. The stone tools have survived over the centuries, unlike clothing, food, or even bones. Archeologists recognize cultural changes by specialized designs of stone tools, called "points," found at various locations.
When we find the same style of point in many different locations, that suggests that the bands of hunters traveled widely and interacted with each other regularly. Physical and cultural barriers were not high enough to cause separate, independent technologies to develop in isolated locations.
When we discover unique designs of points, in different locations that were occupied at the same time period, it suggests that the occupants of those two places had other cultural differences besides their tool technology. Perhaps mobility was blocked by a new physical barrier (unlikely in a non-volcanic area). Possibly, learning from one another was blocked by a religious or political barrier. More likely, the appearance of a new tool design suggests a place was recently occupied by a group that had immigrated from a distance and brought a new cultural pattern with them. By tracing the locations of archeological sites with the unique design, it may be possible to show the migration path leading the group to the new site.
Archeologists assign different names to different designs. "Clovis" points are common throughout Paleo-Indian sites across the Southeast, reaching all the way to the namesake discovery site at the town of Clovis in New Mexico. During that time period, hunters and gatherers ranged across wide sections of the state, and a consistent technology was adopted by many different bands.
Not only can we classify the designs of the tools - we can also identify some quarry sites where tools were made. In Virginia, the Thunderbird site in Warren County along the Shenandoah River was used for 2,000 years. That makes it one of Virginia's first industrial sites.
At the Thunderbird quarry, the manufacturing was just rough work, flaking off the obviously excess rock, before the stone masons hauled away the chunks of good "chert" that flaked in the right pattern to form useful points with sharp edges. They refined those chunks later (away from the site) into the spears, scrapers, fine arrow points, cutting instruments, etc. It makes sense, especially if more than one tribal group used the same quarry, for the natives to grab-'n-go rather than linger around a place where conflict could occur.
The Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) recently identified the Brook Run archaeological site on Route 3, ten miles east of Culpeper and about 100 yards east of the intersection with Carrico Mills road (Route 669). When VDOT routinely examined the planned route of a 4-laning of the Germanna Highway, the shovel test pits in a dense grove of cedar revealed a surprising concentration of debitage, or waste rock flakes that had been discarded. The environmental assessment process to identify unknown cultural resources before altering the landscape worked, in this case. Underneath that cedar grove was the residue of one of the earliest human campsites in North America. The previously unknown location was away from recognized sensitive areas (primarily near water sources), and its discovery was a complete surprise.
What attracted people to that Culpeper site, now designated as 44CU122, so long ago? (NOTE: "44" stands for the state of Virginia, because the record-keeping system for cultural resources was developed in the days before 51 was assigned as the state's Federal Information Processing Standard or FIPS code. "CU" stands for Culpeper County, and "122" designates the individual site in the county.)
One or more bands of early Virginians quarried jasper there from a vein in the local red Triassic sandstone. When hammered with a harder stone, the Triassic sandstone would crumble into loose sand grains. However, the yellowish jasper would crack with a different pattern, creating flakes with sharp edges. Such flakes provided the knives, scrapers, spearpoints, and other cutting tools of the time.
Modern Virginians who can distinguish a Mercedes car from a Jaguar might not be able to distinguish quartz from sandstone, or jasper from basalt. In prehistoric times, stone tools were a key part of everyday life - and the skill of distinguishing different types of rocks was critical to survival. The local bands of early hunters and gatherers were savvy about rocks. They lived in the Stone Age, a time when technology was also based on silicon. Jasper, chert, and quartz are different mineralized forms of silicon dioxide (SiO2), with a mineral structure in a form different from the base of modern computer chips, of course. Even 10,000 years ago, when the technology was "primitive" compared to modern space travel and telecommunications, people depended upon tools to perform specialized jobs.
Someone 11,500 or so years ago was able to spot a small outcrop of rock, perhaps 1-2 feet wide, that was different. Maybe they looked around while resting, as the group of humans kept travelling in order to gather food from plants or hunt game in different habitats. Whatever, for perhaps 500 years, different bands extracted that unique jasper and converted it into the high-tech tools of the time.
The jasper was far easier to "work" than the sandstone. The Paleo-Indians selectively dug it from the quarry, leaving the abundance sandstone behind. When the site was finally abandoned, there was a gash in the ground 1-2 feet wide and about 15 feet deep. Imagine swinging a hard stone in that tight space to break off flakes of rock at the bottom of the vein, when the quarry was narrow and deep. Think you would have been at risk of banging your knuckles, getting cut or even blinded by a slice of stone, or perhaps getting claustrophobia in that tight space? To beat the jasper free at the bottom of the vein, the miners held stones in their hands and hammered the jasper free, while squeezed into a dark and tiny crack in the ground. One possibility is that the prehistoric miners were young children, held upside-down by their ankles as they were pushed down into the narrow dark crevice to break off valuable pieces of jasper.
The jasper was not processed into tools at the quarry. It was carried away to some other place. The archeologists working with VDOT found 700,000 flakes, but almost all were associated with mining the lumps of jasper rather than chipping those "blanks" into individual tools. Those tools were essential for killing, skinning, and butchering an animal for food. Perhaps the band of Virginians took the chunks away in order to do their detail work in a safer location, where there was less risk of a competing band stealing their hard-earned raw material. That would suggest the quarry workers were not only squeezed into a tight space - they were also working in a hurry.
After 500 years, the quarry was abandoned. Roughly 10,600 years ago, someone else stopped at the site and left behind points made of rhyolite. These were probably from Maryland or Delaware. There's a possibility that the traveler who left behind the "Kirk" points had come such a distance, but more likely the tools had been traded from band to band until a local group obtained them.
We date Virginia's archeological sites largely through the charcoal remaining from old cooking and warming fires. At Brook Run, the dates are consistently in the range of 11,000-11,5000 years before present (BP). The wood remaining in the ancient hearths is often spruce, suggesting that the climate at that time was much colder than today. One chunk of white oak charcoal at Brook Run was about 2,000 years older, but it may be the wrong date for human ocupation at the site. It could be an old remnant of an ancient forest fire that was disturbed in the mining operation, and ended up in the sediments that washed into the excavation created by the rock miners years later.