A Mary Baldwin student found a 4,500-year-old stone spear point on Virginia's Eastern Shore on Sept. 21. Brooklyn Rolph was hunting for shark teeth when she spotted the 6-inch artifact. Her professor Paul Callo said he was "truly at a loss for words" when she showed him the rare discovery.

A Mary Baldwin student looking for shark teeth on Virginia's Eastern Shore found an ancient 6-inch spear point.

On Sept. 21, 2026, Brooklyn Rolph had a few spare minutes on a barrier island on Virginia's Eastern Shore. The Mary Baldwin University biology major used them to scan the shell-covered ground for shark teeth, and instead she pulled a stone spear point out of the water.

It lay at the edge of an inlet with the tide coming in. The point measures about 6 inches (15 centimeters) long.

State archaeologists identified it as a Lehigh/Koens-Crispin point and put its age at 3,000 to 4,500 years, according to Mary Baldwin University. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources now holds the point and has not yet published its own description.

Wind, wetsuits, and a seagrass bed

Rolph is a member of the class of 2028 from Hampton, Virginia. She was on a four-day field trip for her ecology course, BIOL 245, based at the University of Virginia's Anheuser-Busch Coastal Research Center, a field station on the Eastern Shore that provides laboratory and dormitory facilities.

Paul Callo, Adam Seroka, Rebecca Haberman and Kadrin Anderson, all from the Mary Baldwin biology faculty, led the trip.

The island stop almost did not happen. Until the wind dropped, the class did not know whether the boats could go out at all, the university said.

The students spent the morning in wetsuits, wading through a seagrass bed and collecting specimens. Tides and currents then allowed only 35 to 40 minutes on a nearby barrier island, with a few free minutes after lunch.

Rolph had found small shark teeth on a beach trip years earlier, and the shells on this island looked promising. She told the university she was already "looking for something pointy."

Sprinting to Seroka

She spotted the point in the water at the edge of an inlet. Callo said the rising tide would soon have buried it.

"And then I pick it up, and I literally sprint to Dr. Seroka, because I'm like, wow, this is so crazy," Rolph said.

Two friends nearby rushed over. Rolph said her professors were even more excited than she was.

Callo said he was "truly at a loss for words" when she showed it to him. He added that she was probably the first person to see and touch the point in thousands of years.

According to Rolph, the archaeologist who later examined it said he had never seen one in such good condition.

Property of the Commonwealth

Callo warned Rolph that she might have to give the point up. The island is part of a natural area preserve owned by the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation, and the university says the class visited it with a state-issued permit.

Rolph showed the point to the research center's site director, who made a phone call. The answer came back that the point belonged to the state.

Section 10.1-2303 of the Virginia Antiquities Act states that all objects of antiquity found on state-controlled land remain the property of the Commonwealth. The same section reserves field investigation on those sites to the director of historic resources.

Later that day, at the state archaeologist's request, Conservation and Recreation staff picked up the point from the research center's bunkhouse. They took it to the Virginia Department of Historic Resources for further study.

Late Archaic broadspear type

The Lehigh/Koens-Crispin type dates to the Late Archaic period. The Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory cites a range of 2500 to 1700 BC from archaeologist Jay Custer, while other researchers give narrower spans.

The lab's online guide describes a large, well-made point with a broad blade and a short stem that usually narrows toward the base. Makers shaped it by soft percussion, with little or no pressure retouching.

Archaeologists group these points with the broadspears (large, broad-bladed points), although the guide notes that many were used as knives. In samples from Maryland river valleys, most were made of quartzite or rhyolite, with fewer in quartz.

The type was first identified in 1916. Dorothy Cross named it in 1941 after the Koens-Crispin site, and W. Fred Kinsey combined it with the Lehigh point in 1972.

The guide lists lengths of 1.7 to 4.7 inches (44 to 120 millimeters). At about 6 inches, the Eastern Shore point is longer than that range.

Turbidity, oysters and sea squirts

The spear point was a surprise, but the rest of the trip ran as planned. The biology department makes the Eastern Shore trip every year, and each student designs and runs an experiment.

Rolph measured water turbidity, or cloudiness. She timed how fast filter feeders such as oysters and sea squirts cleared murky water, and she said running an experiment on her own was something she had not really done before.

Callo said the main goal is to let students explore coastal ecosystems that many have never seen before. He credited the research center's staff with keeping the trip going each year.

The islands are studied by the Virginia Coast Reserve Long-Term Ecological Research program, which covers barrier islands, lagoons and marshes on the Eastern Shore.

A paper in Nature Geoscience predicts that barrier islands will disappear 50 percent faster than they have in the past, and other work shows that dunes stripped of vegetation may fail to recover.

Age read from shape alone

The 3,000 to 4,500 year estimate comes from the point's type, not from a laboratory date. Mary Baldwin's account mentions no other objects, bones or charcoal found with it.

The university has not named the island. The Department of Historic Resources has not released a report on the point, its stone or any plan to display it.

Chance finds by students do sometimes reach specialists quickly. In July 2025, a Newcastle University archaeology student found a 1,100-year-old gold object within 90 minutes of her first dig in Northumberland, England.

Stone points also anchor much older questions, such as tools 13,500 to 20,000 years old that suggest the first Americans may have followed the Pacific coast.

For Rolph, the island stop began as a short search for shark teeth. Before the day was out, she had handed the point to the state.

The information was obtained from Mary Baldwin University.

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