This projectile point is from the Belcarra site, on British Columbia's coast and is made on a kind of coarse basalt common on the coast. Small projectile points like this are common throughout areas where arrows were used. Although they sometimes measure as small as 1 centimeter in length, when hafted onto an arrow shaft, they provided all the cutting edge necessary to take down large land mammals.

Sometimes artifacts are encountered on the surface of the ground, without any archaeological context to tell the archaeologist how old it is. When this happens, archaeologists rely on 'typologies' constructed from similar finds in archaeological sites throughout a region. A typology is a kind of story-board that shows the stylistic changes in particular artifact types through time. So, even if an artifact like this was discovered without any contextual information, based on local typologies, we could guess that it dates to between 750 and 200 years ago on the coast. In other regions, artifacts like this might be earlier or later.