NYSAA Bulletin No. 52 — Archaic Sites: Croton Point & Dogan Point — Passage 3 (part 5)

[Various (1971)] Moreover, these southeastern sites have not produced choppers, celts or adzes, or indeed any ground stone items such as occur on the Staten Island components. In the southeastern sites the temporal range of the point styles reported for Staten Island is as much as 2000 years on radiocarbon or estimated dates, or between c. 8000-6000 B.C. There are C-14 dates on charcoal for three of the Staten Island sites, also with a range of some 2000 years, but the dates are not consistent with the point types, as they appear in the Southeast. These Staten Island dates are as follows: 5310 B.C. ± 140 years (I-4070), 6300 B.C. ± 140 years (I-5331), and 7410 B.C. ± 120 years (I-4929).

Obviously, more excavation is in order to clarify the picture, but the presence on Staten Island, on the southeastern periphery of New York State, of Early Archaic point forms of the southeastern United States is unequivocal and significant. It is noteworthy that so far no evidence of this kind has been reported for neighboring Long Island. Prior to the recent Staten Island finds the discovery of Early Archaic vestiges closest to the Northeast came from the deepest zones of the Sheep Rock Shelter in south central Pennsylvania where two Kirk Corner-Notched points were found in a level dated at 5100 B.C.