‘This is so crazy!’ Virginia college student looking for shark teeth finds rare Native American spearpoint

On the last day of an ecology field trip to Virginia’s Eastern Shore, a biology undergraduate student discovered more than she expected. While searching for shark teeth, Brooklyn Rolph, a student at Mary Baldwin University in Virginia, stumbled upon a stone spearpoint estimated to be around 4,500 years old.

“Wow, this is so crazy,” Rolph said in a statement. Already primed to look for pointy objects underwater, Rolph found a stone spear and immediately alerted the professors running the trip. “They were ecstatic,” she recalled.

The stone artifact is about 6 inches (15 centimeters) long and, according to local archaeologists, a type known as a Lehigh/Koens-Crispin point. This kind of stone tool was made by Indigenous people across the East Coast of the U.S. from around 4,500 to 3,000 years ago. Sometimes called a “broadspear,” the stone point also may have been used as a knife by prehistoric hunter-gatherers in the Late Archaic period.

The field trip was part of an ecology course led by Mary Baldwin University faculty members who had secured a permit from the state to explore the barrier islands off the Eastern Shore, the southern part of the Delmarva Peninsula that includes most of Delaware and parts of Virginia and Maryland.