They have a weighted point, often of stone, on a removable foreshaft.

One end of a foreshaft was attached to a projectile point with pitch and sinew.

A type of artifact found in rivers in northern Florida is the ivory foreshaft.

The arrows collected were represented by a compound type with a reed mainshaft and a wooden foreshaft.

The simple Aleut harpoon consisted of four main parts: the wooden shaft, the bone foreshaft, and the bonehead (tip) with barbs pointed backward.

The barbed head was loosely fitted into the socket of the foreshaft so that when the animal was stabbed, it pulled the head away from the rest of the harpoon.

Harpoons were also called throwing-arrows when the pointed head fit loosely into the socket of the foreshaft and the head was able to detach from the harpoon when it penetrated an animal, and remain in the wound.

The Clovis blade differs from the Solutrean in that some of the former have bi-facial fluting (a long depression that occurs on a point, struck from the basal end of the point; the purpose was to better fit the point onto a spear foreshaft).