NYSAA Bulletin No. 52 — Archaic Sites: Croton Point & Dogan Point — Passage 3 (part 19)

[Various (1971)] The Squibnocket complex appears to have been the predominant Late Archaic manifestation of southern New England, as was the contemporaneous and closely related Sylvan Lake complex of eastern and southern New York. A large site of this kind was excavated by the writer at Wading River on eastern Long Island (Ritchie 1959: 78-88), and recent excavations by Ronald Wyatt of the Nassau County Museum have confirmed the importance of No. 52, July 1971 7 the "small stemmed point" complex on Long Island. On some of his sites Wading River points occur only in the lowest levels, on others they are present throughout the deposits, sometimes in association with other point styles (by conversation). The vast majority of the "small stemmed points" of southern New England and eastern and southern New York are made from quartz, and less commonly, quartzite pebbles (Ritchie 1965b). This quartz pebble industry is environmentally related to the Coastal Plain and glacial outwash gravels, the principal sources of such raw materials. In the middle Hudson Valley the high-grade flint of the Normanskill formations substituted for the difficult to obtain quartz pebbles, and flint gradually came to replace quartz in the manufacture of the narrowbladed point forms of eastern New York.