Tallahatta Quartzite
That Beautiful Sandstone
Millions of years in the past, the marine seas covered much of the continental United States and, as in many of the world’s ocean beds, there was an abundance of sand. As various minerals percolated slowly through the ocean waters into the sand, it began to cement and harden into sandstone and as the sea levels began to drop during the modern continent formations, this sandstone again began to cement and hardened into a material called quartzite. In southern Alabama and Mississippi, this occurrence produced one of our most remarkably beautiful stones – Tallahatta quartzite
Tallahatta quartzite was named for the Tallahatta Geologic Formation in the Tallahatta Hills of Choctow County, Alabama. The word Tallahatta apparently is derived from an old Choctow Indian work meaning “white rock”. It is a smoky grey and sugary grained rock with distinct white snowflake patterns and is composed of indurate medium grain quartz sand, weakly luminescent opal, chalcedony and sparkly drusy quartz and is often imbedded with lenses of tan chert which was also a marine evolving stone. Since it was formed in an ocean environment, this quartzite stone frequently shows fossilized marine shells or holes where they once were. The Alabama Geologic Survey describes the Tallahatta Formation as “pale-green marine siliceous claystone with beds of claucenitic sand and sandstone” which is a complicated scientific way of saying quartzite. This porphyritic metamorphic stone is usually a pale grey with reasonably large quartz phenocrysts but it can vary to dark grey and even medium to dark brown depending on the exact mineral makeup and whether a given rock has been underwater in the area tannic acid rich streams.
The earliest Americans discovered this indurate sandstone more than ten thousand years ago in the Paleolithic Period and used the material to make the classic Paleo artifacts – the Clovis points. And thousands of Indians for thousands of years after that time also utilized this bright grainy quartzite for spear points, arrowheads, knives, drills, scrapers and many other needed tools. In southern Alabama and Mississippi it was most abundant both in outcroppings and as river and stream cobbles and the natives certainly made use of this unique rock. During the 7,000 thousand years long Archaic Period, the ancients used this distinct sugar textured stone to make their tools that today have names as distinct as the quartzite – Dalton, Bolen, Kirk, Eva, Benton, Savannah River, Putnam, Pickwick, Elora, Flint Creek, Limestone and Culbreath. But the Amerinds of the Woodland and Mississippian Periods, beginning around 1,000 BC, seemed not to use this material as much as the archaic people and the quality of the workmanship also seemed not as good. Maybe this was because these people were settling into a more sedentary lifestyle which was more and more dominated by ceremonial, social, religious and crop growing activities and less and less into utilitarian aspects such as hunting which needed the well made projectile points. The natives, from all time periods, must have traded this stone to others far removed from the south-central Alabama/Mississippi regional core of the Tallahatta quartzite quarries since artifacts made from this rock have been found many miles away in modern Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas and beyond. While this writer has never seen any artifacts made of traded Talahatta quartzite that were found in Virginia or the Carolinas, there is a good chance that it has happened. It is one of my favorite lithic materials and I do enjoy studying my collection of artifacts made of Talahatta quartzite – that beautiful sandstone.
REFERENCES:
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CENTRAL STATES ARCHAEOLOCAL JOURNAL, Vol. 40, No. 2
1993
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