Item PL03
This Item was Sold on 10 December
2012 for $14
Similar artifacts for sale are often found on the Lithic
Artifacts web page.
Historical Pricing information for this item and similar artifacts
can be found at: Historical Artifact
Prices.
This Pre-Columbian Neolithic Celt is from Central Panama.
This celt has been knapped and then the cutting edge was
ground down, so it is Neolithic, rather than Paleolithic. I
lived in Panama as a child in the 1950s and 1960s. I
collected similar celts around the shoreline of Gatun Lake.
This type of celt was occasionally found on the SE shoreline
of Navy Island which is located less than a mile from the
southern approach to Gatun Locks. This type of celt was also
found along the shoreline of Madden Lake. I brought several
celts that looked just like this one to U.C. Berkeley in the
1960s. A professor in the Dept. of Anthropology said that my
celts resembled similar celts in the U.C. Berkeley
collection that were dated between 500 B.C. and 1,000 A.D.
This particular celt is small. It has a lenticular
cross-section and the material is Basalt. There are a couple
of chips on the cutting edge. View pdf files showing Panama
Celt sale prices on eBay: Celt
#1 and Celt
#2.