Summary

This flint arrowhead is tanged and barbed and comes from Clough, County Antrim, in what is today Northern Ireland. The original register states that it is from the Neolithic period (approximately 4000 BCE to 2500 BCE by today's understanding), a time marked by the arrival of farmers from Europe who brought with them domesticated larger animals such as cows and sheep and who practised cropping (Cummings, 2025, p. 1). The arrival in Britain about 4,400 years ago of the Bell Beaker people (a group with Ancestral links to the Eurasian steppes) is seen as marking a transition point between the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods, and finely made arrowheads are characteristic of archaeological finds from this time ('Barbed and tanged arrowhead, Clough, Ireland, MoST ID 5711; McNish, 22 February 2018).
This arrowhead was given to the museum in 1899 by William Spotswood Knowles as one of 27 Irish implements that probably came from the collection of his famous antiquiarian father, William James Knowles. It fits within the 'stemmed class' of projectile points in the typology published by WJ Knowles in 1903. In 'Irish flint arrow- and spear-heads', Knowles senior reported that he held 1,589 'Stemmed and barbed' specimens of this type. An accompanying sketch (carried out by one of his daughters) illustrates 14 examples of this class, with X 11385 particularly resembling specimen Number 60 in the illustration. WJ Knowles surmised that those implements of three inches to four inches in length were spearheads; this tool, at just under two inches in length, would therefore better fit within the category of arrowhead, although it entered the Museums Victoria collection as a 'javelin point'.

Bibliography
'Barbed and tanged arrowhead, Clough, Ireland', MoST ID 5711, Museum of Stone Tools, https://stonetoolsmuseum.com/artefact/europe/barbed-and-tanged-arrowhead/5711/, accessed 22 September 2025.
Vicki Cummings, The Neolithic of Britain and Ireland, 2nd Edition (London: Routledge, 2025).
WJ Knowles, 'Irish flint arrow- and spear-heads', The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 33, Jan-June 1903, pp. 44-56.
James McNish, 'The Beaker people: a new population for ancient Britain', Natural History Museum website, 22 February 2018, https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2018/february/the-beaker-people-a-new-population-for-ancient-britain.html, accessed 22 September 2025.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Professor Mark Moore of the Museum of Stone Tools.

Physical Description

Arrowhead or projectile point of flint, barbed and tanged.

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