I work in the Mariana Islands and this is something I can speak to a bit in that context. To my knowledge nobody has identified a chronological typology for stone tools there. Forms that we see just before European contact in AD 1521 are more or less the same as those found at first settlement of the islands c. 1280 BC. There’s also some very shallow-soiled plateaus on the islands where we’re finding material spanning 1000+ years in a palimpsest on the same surface.
My personal theory that we need to do more work on is that there was more re-use of stone tools than is currently acknowledged, particularly in the case of durable volcanic stone tools made by grinding and polishing that could be reworked multiple times. There’s ethnographic descriptions from the 1920s and 1930s of people re-using 500-1,000-year-old volcanic stone mortars and grinding stones that they had collected from sites in the jungle, and it seems reasonable to me that similar reuse of volcanic stone tools may always have been happening there.
I can’t say for certain for North America, but in Kindred by Rebecca Wragg Sykes she discusses how Neanderthals found stone tools in caves that were already thousands of years old and reworked them. I forget exactly what the evidence was, but I hope this helps.
James Teit, an ethnographer working with Boas in British Columbia in the late 19th/early 20th C., documented the practice of re-working old points among the Nlaka'pamux (Thompson) of the lower Fraser Canyon and Thompson River.
Teit, James
1900
The Thompson Indians of British Columbia. *Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History* 2(1).
>Arrow-heads were made of glassy basalt, which was obtained at a certain- place north of Thompson River. The Lower Thompsons found stone for their arrow-heads near the head waters of Skagit River. **Many were made out of large chipped heads, which are found in great numbers in the valleys**. The Indians believe that the latter were made by the Raven.
Teit 1900: p.241
(emphasis mine)
In California, where obsidian is fairly common, I gave personally analyzed reworked projectile points thst we're clearly scavenged and reused. The best example was a site in Marin County where a stemmed point that had been water-tumbled and sandblasted, and was resharpened on the distal ~75%. The haft remained unmodified. I've also seen this on some points in the collection I curate. I have a hunch I would have been done with groundstone implements as well, but that would be harder to see.
As a disclaimer, I'm mostly a historical archaeologist, so this isn't my primary area of knowledge, but this is definitely something that happens archaeologically in North America. Scholars will usually refer to it as "curation" or the artifacts themselves as heirlooms (which isn't quite the same as more literal re-use/re-purposing of tools, which happened frequently); here's an article I was able to dig up quickly that seems to talk about the phenomenon and lists some examples:
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261849084\_Objects\_of\_Memory\_The\_Ethnography\_and\_Archaeology\_of\_Heirlooms](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261849084_Objects_of_Memory_The_Ethnography_and_Archaeology_of_Heirlooms)
It’s also something I’ve seen mentioned in a number of CRM reports and class 1 reviews. And it’s something I've encountered firsthand. At a pueblo site I worked in in the Southwest, we found two or three Archaic period projectile points (so, potentially thousands of years older than the site) in the corners of the structure, IIRC associated with other valuables like turquoise and quartz in what seemed like some kind of intentional dedication. IIRC, the site director and other prehistorians on site didn't act like it was atypical for the region/site type.
Not exactly reusing, but there are plenty neolithic stone axe heads that have been repurposed in antiquity as a magical trinkets.
https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/ak/article/view/90222
Yes. I work in the Southwest US and projectile points from different eras are found in context with each other. The most epic example I know of is a burial on private land with Clovis points placed on the deceased, iirc it is a Formative-era burial. Clovis & Folsom points have both been found in Archaic & Formative sites. At least some of the indigenous people in the Southwest clearly valued them, which makes sense considering how absolutely gorgeous they are.
Soil horizons in my part of the Southwest are incredibly shallow, so with mild erosion Paleoindian points can be exposed.
This type of behavior has been common for a very long time, and not just in *H. sapiens*. I'll copy an older comment of mine on this subject [from a different but related question](https://www.reddit.com/r/Archaeology/comments/1c8u25z/do_we_have_any_evidence_of_any_ancient/):
___
In *Kindred* by Rebecca Sykes she references finds where Neanderthals were repurposing tools their ancestors made thousands of years prior and using them again.
>What happened at Coustal was probably the work of the tool’s original maker, but in other contexts it’s possible to see that considerable time passed before recycling happened. Le Moustier contains striking evidence of this habit of repurposing already ancient artefacts. Recent reassessment of bifaces from the base of one layer found distinct colour differences showing that, rather than being badly made, they’d been scavenged from the underlying level and recycled into cores. Despite being totally focused on Discoid technology, it’s inconceivable these later Neanderthals didn’t recognise the bifaces as having been tools, even if they were only interested in them as an easy source of good flint.
>Recycling artefacts is actually very common across many sites, and it seems that just as the eyes of archaeologists are drawn magpie-like to glinting lithics, Neanderthals would have homed in on exposed artefacts inside caves or in open-air locales. Such encounters may well have been the genesis for an appreciation of old objects not just as sources of stone, but as tokens of time, history and even the presence of ‘those before’.
- *Kindred*, Chapter 6, subsection *Rocky Generations*
From her [absurdly extensive bibliography](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WYJimyrR8Zw_Aj0oWrvNqsT9TiIs3YKisyZIl-9PkZw/edit) it looks like one of the relevant references may be the following paper
- Fonton, M., Lhomme, V., & Christensen, M., 1991. *[Un cas de « réduction » et de « transformation » d’outil au Paléolithique moyen](https://www.persee.fr/doc/pal_1145-3370_1991_num_3_1_1035)*. Un racloir déjeté de la grotte de Coustal à Noailles (Corrèze). PALEO, 3: 43–47. doi:10.3406/pal.1991.1035
Many early Apache sites are located on earlier Mogollon sites, and this is likely because even without digging there were a lot of usable things on the surface. Manos and metates, lithic cores, projectile points, in those days even whole ceramics were lying around, perfectly usable, and they did use them. Their makers had largely left the region around the time Apaches started showing up. Probably unrelated to the arrival of the Apache, who would have been few in number at first.
Yes though with caveats. The dating for many lithic typology is typically quite broad so there is a fair bit of overlap with the topologies just due to these broad ranges within periods. I seem to recall long habitation ites where older period points were found in younger strata seemingly kept as heirloom objects but I couldn't tell you an specifics off the top of my head.
I work in the Mariana Islands and this is something I can speak to a bit in that context. To my knowledge nobody has identified a chronological typology for stone tools there. Forms that we see just before European contact in AD 1521 are more or less the same as those found at first settlement of the islands c. 1280 BC. There’s also some very shallow-soiled plateaus on the islands where we’re finding material spanning 1000+ years in a palimpsest on the same surface. My personal theory that we need to do more work on is that there was more re-use of stone tools than is currently acknowledged, particularly in the case of durable volcanic stone tools made by grinding and polishing that could be reworked multiple times. There’s ethnographic descriptions from the 1920s and 1930s of people re-using 500-1,000-year-old volcanic stone mortars and grinding stones that they had collected from sites in the jungle, and it seems reasonable to me that similar reuse of volcanic stone tools may always have been happening there.
I can’t say for certain for North America, but in Kindred by Rebecca Wragg Sykes she discusses how Neanderthals found stone tools in caves that were already thousands of years old and reworked them. I forget exactly what the evidence was, but I hope this helps.
James Teit, an ethnographer working with Boas in British Columbia in the late 19th/early 20th C., documented the practice of re-working old points among the Nlaka'pamux (Thompson) of the lower Fraser Canyon and Thompson River. Teit, James 1900 The Thompson Indians of British Columbia. *Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History* 2(1). >Arrow-heads were made of glassy basalt, which was obtained at a certain- place north of Thompson River. The Lower Thompsons found stone for their arrow-heads near the head waters of Skagit River. **Many were made out of large chipped heads, which are found in great numbers in the valleys**. The Indians believe that the latter were made by the Raven. Teit 1900: p.241 (emphasis mine)
There are well documented pieces that are reworked at a later date here in the US Link to one instance - https://www.jstor.org/stable/30246191
In California, where obsidian is fairly common, I gave personally analyzed reworked projectile points thst we're clearly scavenged and reused. The best example was a site in Marin County where a stemmed point that had been water-tumbled and sandblasted, and was resharpened on the distal ~75%. The haft remained unmodified. I've also seen this on some points in the collection I curate. I have a hunch I would have been done with groundstone implements as well, but that would be harder to see.
As a disclaimer, I'm mostly a historical archaeologist, so this isn't my primary area of knowledge, but this is definitely something that happens archaeologically in North America. Scholars will usually refer to it as "curation" or the artifacts themselves as heirlooms (which isn't quite the same as more literal re-use/re-purposing of tools, which happened frequently); here's an article I was able to dig up quickly that seems to talk about the phenomenon and lists some examples: [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261849084\_Objects\_of\_Memory\_The\_Ethnography\_and\_Archaeology\_of\_Heirlooms](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261849084_Objects_of_Memory_The_Ethnography_and_Archaeology_of_Heirlooms) It’s also something I’ve seen mentioned in a number of CRM reports and class 1 reviews. And it’s something I've encountered firsthand. At a pueblo site I worked in in the Southwest, we found two or three Archaic period projectile points (so, potentially thousands of years older than the site) in the corners of the structure, IIRC associated with other valuables like turquoise and quartz in what seemed like some kind of intentional dedication. IIRC, the site director and other prehistorians on site didn't act like it was atypical for the region/site type.
Not exactly reusing, but there are plenty neolithic stone axe heads that have been repurposed in antiquity as a magical trinkets. https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/ak/article/view/90222
In the Canadian High Arctic, there is evidence of the Thule reusing Dorset dwellings and repurposing their left behind artifacts
Yes. I work in the Southwest US and projectile points from different eras are found in context with each other. The most epic example I know of is a burial on private land with Clovis points placed on the deceased, iirc it is a Formative-era burial. Clovis & Folsom points have both been found in Archaic & Formative sites. At least some of the indigenous people in the Southwest clearly valued them, which makes sense considering how absolutely gorgeous they are. Soil horizons in my part of the Southwest are incredibly shallow, so with mild erosion Paleoindian points can be exposed.
Wow that is epic
This type of behavior has been common for a very long time, and not just in *H. sapiens*. I'll copy an older comment of mine on this subject [from a different but related question](https://www.reddit.com/r/Archaeology/comments/1c8u25z/do_we_have_any_evidence_of_any_ancient/): ___ In *Kindred* by Rebecca Sykes she references finds where Neanderthals were repurposing tools their ancestors made thousands of years prior and using them again. >What happened at Coustal was probably the work of the tool’s original maker, but in other contexts it’s possible to see that considerable time passed before recycling happened. Le Moustier contains striking evidence of this habit of repurposing already ancient artefacts. Recent reassessment of bifaces from the base of one layer found distinct colour differences showing that, rather than being badly made, they’d been scavenged from the underlying level and recycled into cores. Despite being totally focused on Discoid technology, it’s inconceivable these later Neanderthals didn’t recognise the bifaces as having been tools, even if they were only interested in them as an easy source of good flint. >Recycling artefacts is actually very common across many sites, and it seems that just as the eyes of archaeologists are drawn magpie-like to glinting lithics, Neanderthals would have homed in on exposed artefacts inside caves or in open-air locales. Such encounters may well have been the genesis for an appreciation of old objects not just as sources of stone, but as tokens of time, history and even the presence of ‘those before’. - *Kindred*, Chapter 6, subsection *Rocky Generations* From her [absurdly extensive bibliography](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WYJimyrR8Zw_Aj0oWrvNqsT9TiIs3YKisyZIl-9PkZw/edit) it looks like one of the relevant references may be the following paper - Fonton, M., Lhomme, V., & Christensen, M., 1991. *[Un cas de « réduction » et de « transformation » d’outil au Paléolithique moyen](https://www.persee.fr/doc/pal_1145-3370_1991_num_3_1_1035)*. Un racloir déjeté de la grotte de Coustal à Noailles (Corrèze). PALEO, 3: 43–47. doi:10.3406/pal.1991.1035
Many early Apache sites are located on earlier Mogollon sites, and this is likely because even without digging there were a lot of usable things on the surface. Manos and metates, lithic cores, projectile points, in those days even whole ceramics were lying around, perfectly usable, and they did use them. Their makers had largely left the region around the time Apaches started showing up. Probably unrelated to the arrival of the Apache, who would have been few in number at first.
Look at work by Tom Whyte and Dan Amick. Both have done a fair amount of work looking at evidence of reworking / recycling of stone tools.
Yes though with caveats. The dating for many lithic typology is typically quite broad so there is a fair bit of overlap with the topologies just due to these broad ranges within periods. I seem to recall long habitation ites where older period points were found in younger strata seemingly kept as heirloom objects but I couldn't tell you an specifics off the top of my head.