By Caroline Boerger
March 5, 2025
Caroline Boerger earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology at Appalachian State University and is currently completing a Master’s degree in anthropology with a focus in archaeology at Northern Arizona University. Between the two degrees, Caroline worked for the National Park Service (NPS) and as a field school instructor, and is currently an archaeologist with the NPS.
At a logging camp such as Apex, one expects to find everyday items from the past 100 years, including cans, glass bottles, personal hygiene items, and car parts. Those artifacts are reflections of how people went about their everyday lives, utilizing necessities either traded amongst themselves or bought with their hard earned money. Amongst the house foundation and wood scatter of the camp superintendent, however, was a historic artifact that did not fall into the category of everyday items and perhaps sheds more light into the early days of the Indigenous souvenir trade in Northern Arizona.
The artifact is a replica uniface, or one-sided, mahogany obsidian projectile point, measuring approximately 45 cm long by 16 cm wide. As all the other artifacts found in association with the point date to Apex’s time frame, we have no reason to doubt that this projectile point does as well. The point was simplistically flintknapped on just one side, while the other was left flat, perhaps for display purposes by the knapper or out of expediency. The material type (mahogany obsidian) can be found in Northern Arizona but not directly in the area near Apex. The raw material for the point was likely brought from outside the local area and appears to be created solely for tourism purposes.
Grand Canyon Tourism
Today, the Grand Canyon National Park area is known as a major tourist destination for people from across the globe. At the time Apex was first inhabited, the Grand Canyon had been established for less than a decade, but the souvenir trade had already been in full swing. Items such as blankets, jewelry, pottery, and other Native crafts were popular mementos for tourists visiting the area around the turn-of-the-century.
In 1898, John George Verkamp moved from Ohio to the Grand Canyon and set up a curio shop near Bright Angel Hotel. He sold Native American souvenirs for a brief time before closing. In 1905, Verkamp returned to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon where he and his family built a new store, Verkamp’s Curios. That store employed Indigenous craftsmen and was a major source of souvenir distribution and remained open until 2008. The building, located in the present-day Village Historic District, is still in use as Verkamp’s Visitor Center.
Also in 1905, the Santa Fe Railroad and the Fred Harvey Company built Hopi House just adjacent to Verkamp’s Curios. Hopi House, designed by Mary Colter on behalf of the Fred Harvey Company, was established as a place where curious tourists could observe Native American demonstrators and artisans crafting various goods, capitalizing on the incorrect notion that Native American groups were “disappearing,” which initially attracted tourists to Hopi House. The store is still currently open to the public.
Replicas and Fakes
The Grand Canyon’s tourism industry in the 1920s was largely unregulated. This allowed vendors to set up camp wherever they chose, selling goods that ranged from local crafts to mass-produced souvenirs. In this environment, many tourists were unaware that the so-called “authentic” Native American artifacts they were purchasing were often manufactured by non-Indigenous people.
Henry Miller was one figure that did just that and was associated with the early days of tourism along Route 66. Miller first began his ventures around 1915 at Walnut Canyon National Monument, just east of Flagstaff, Arizona. There, Miller sold stereotyped and inauthentic Native American artifacts that he himself made, before moving onto Fort Two Guns where he continued his ventures.
Lithics at Apex
Aside from the smattering of debitage found across the site, two likely pre-contact projectile point fragments were also found at Apex–one at the kitchen and one at management housing. Both are white chert with bifacial knapping and approximately 15 to 20 cm wide.
Apex’s residents possibly encountered these lithics while logging on the forest and brought them back home, like so many other tourists who collect artifacts without regard for their context or history. The souvenir projectile point might, then, point to of a larger pattern of Apex’s residents collecting Indigenous artifacts, or ones they believed to be Indigenous.
While not much is known about the replica projectile point found in Apex, or about the history of souvenir lithics in general, it is likely that it was obtained within Northern Arizona due to the material type and abundance of souvenir shops like Hopi House, Verkamp’s Curios, and other shops. The presence of the point in Apex shows the souvenir trade reached not only the tourists coming to Arizona from all over, but also the loggers and their families working on the very railroad transporting tourists who too took part in the rampant souvenir trade.
As today’s artifact is a bit of an unknown itself, it will also serve as this month’s Mystery Artifact! If you have more information on the history of the lithic souvenir industry, let us know!
Sources
Chappell, Gordon. 1976. Railroad at the Rim: The Origin and Growth of Grand Canyon Village. The Journal of Arizona History 17(1):89–107.
Hopi House – Nature, Culture and History at the Grand Canyon. https://grcahistory.org/sites/south-rim/hopi-house/, accessed March 2, 2025.
Stampoulos, Linda. 2004. Visiting the Grand Canyon: Views of Early Tourism. Arcadia Publishing.
Makeda, Lillian. 1984. The Lion Farm and the National Park Service: Defining an Architectural Vision for Petrified Forest. Masters thesis, School of Architecture, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
Verkamp’s Visitor Center – Grand Canyon National Park (U.S. National Park Service). https://www.nps.gov/grca/planyourvisit/verkamps.htm, accessed March 2, 2025.
Whittaker, John C. and Michael Stafford 1999. Replicas, Fakes, and Art: The Twentieth Century Stone Age and Its Effects on Archaeology. American Antiquity 64(2):203-214.