New display at Beautiful Plains Museum is on point

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Published on Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Beautiful Plains Museum

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If you haven’t visited the Beautiful Plains Museum for a while, or at all, I strongly recommend you come in and check it out!

Here at the museum we are constantly putting out new artifacts for our visitors to look at. One of our newest displays is our Native Artifact display.

In our display we have many spear points, arrowheads, dart points, and stone hammerheads that were made by Indigenous people living in this area many years ago. Back in 2016, these artifacts were identified and dated here at the museum by students from Brandon University. Our oldest artifact in this display is the Clovis Spearpoint, which can be dated back to 10,500 to 12,000 years ago. To put that number into perspective, these types of spear points are found on kill sites associated with mammoth remains! We also have two hammerheads that were found back in 1929 when a house was being excavated on the corner of Ellen Street and First Avenue here in Neepawa!

All of the artifacts in this display have had extensive time and skill put into them to perfect. When carving these projectile points, you had to be very precise with every chip because if you hit your rock the wrong way, it’d break and you’d have to start all over. By looking at the size of these projectile points you will be able to conclude how much skill was needed to make these points. The Avonlea arrowheads have lengths starting at just 1.3 centimetres!

If you’re considering checking out our newest display, along with the rest of the museum, we are open Monday to Friday from 9:00a.m.-5:00 for the rest of June and starting in July we are open Monday to Saturday 9:00-5:00 and 1:00-5:00 on Sundays and stat holidays.