If the atlatl items are associated with male AND female burials, it would be interesting to see how many are associated ONLY with females. And it looks like some of them were buried together in the same grave. The percentages for each gender (and together) would be useful info.
It's also very interesting to see a 3 to 1 ratio in favor of bannerstones NOT being buried with people.
Do you know how many were "winged" type bannerstones, if any?
C.B. Moore 1915 Indian Knoll Excavation: Moore examined 298 graves and found 32 of them had atlatl parts in them. He didn’t however, call them atlatl parts. He called them “net spacers” or "sizers" and “needles”. One of them was a segmented shell “spacer”. Webb produced a table with these grave/ atlatl finds and I have provided it below. Webb included this table on page 321 of his report entitled Atlatls and Bannerstones: Excavations at Indian Knoll Kentucky, 1946 as part of his report.
The atlatl parts were reported as 5 with adult males, 3 with adult females, 4 with adults (gender ?) 7 with children and 13 with adults where age and gender was undetermined.
5 of the bannerstones and antler hooks were directly aligned.
I saw a note in Webb’s publication that said Moore sent 66 skeletons and associated grave goods to the National Museum. He didn’t send the whole dig or all that he found. I wonder if this was the source of the differing numbers of bannerstones? It will take some more obscure reading to get to the bottom of that one.
W.S. Webb 1940s Indian Knoll Excavation: Later in the 1940s as part of the WPA program Webb provided a report on 880 additional burials on the Indian Knoll site. He reported 44 burials with associated atlatl parts. Webb summarized Moore’s’ findings in a table I have scanned and provided below. He included this table on page 325 & 326 of his report entitled Atlatls and Bannerstones: Excavations at Indian Knoll Kentucky, which is where I got the numbers previously.
I have scanned two pages from that report that summarizes information associated with those 44 burials.
So for the Indian Knoll site: if you include Moore’s 1915 report and Webb’s 1946 report there were 1178 graves examined, and a total of 76 graves with atlatls buried with them. That is roughly 6% of the burials had atlatls in some form or fashion.
I also found it interesting that 275 of the 880 burials documented in Webb’s work, had any non-decomposed grave goods (shell, copper, bone, antler, stone). I am certain that less decay resistant materials (wood, fabric, cordage, etc.) were also placed in the graves and just succumb to the elements.
On Webb’s work roughly ¼ of the graves with atlatls were with females. The rest were male.
For Moore’s work only 8 of the 32 had gender determination. 3 female and 5 male.
Other fun facts:
Webb found lots of projectile points. Most were in general excavation with smaller amounts found in burials.
• Stemmed points (736 general exc./ 23 in burial)
• Corner notched 1917/28
• Side notched 2913/4
• Short stemmed 27/3
• Broken points 1777/7
Another fun fact, I saw a few whelk shell gorgets listed in the finds. That was a surprise too. Sad part is I read this publication several years back but didn’t pick up on that. This whole general discussion has caused me to read more closely and it was been immensely rewarding.
