The son of a "Virginia Rockhounds" Facebook page member found this over the weekend in a creek that empties into the Potomac River south of D.C.

Well yes, tim, I can see how this "baseless" artifact could be a conundrum to some and a point of contention to others.
First of all, the merciless patina and rounding of having been in or near a creek all this time has all but erased some helpful tell-tales, even if you were holding it in your hand.
And the first question would be; Is the base broken or missing?
This is one place the patina makes it more difficult to see if the base has been snapped off or is just chipped like that.
I don't think it was a cache blade and purposely left like that. The edges have been retouched, worked and finished. And I don't think it was made as a lanceolate type. It is too narrow and thin looking.
I think the base is missing.
If the base is missing then you can't really type it for sure. It could have a lot of different types of bases. What you got to look at to get a good idea of what it may have been is the shoulders, and there aren't any. Very slight rounding of the point to the base. Many types of points with bases will have straight or angled notches at the shoulders. These shoulders taper so slightly it is hard to say if there was a base or if this is a lanceolate form.
How much older does the extreme patina make it look and what is the material? Big factors.
Looks like it might be made from the same siltstone argillite or rhyolite used around here.
I don't think it was a Morrow Mountain/ Stark/ Poplar Island type. It doesn't look thick enough.
And I don't think it had a bottom like the one I pictured below, but I have seen those type with narrow necks and small bases that can easily snap off.
Because of where it was found I would have to type it as a broken Orient Fishtail, circa 1230 - 763 BC.
Sorry, I don't have a good pic of the Orient Fishtail. (Crazy name for a projectile point!)
What it is now is a "point" that kid will remember finding the rest of his life!

The finder's dad original post stated this: "... Early to mid archaic period. Thats 8000 to 2000 b.c.! He was so freakin excited. AWESOME, AWESOME find."  He didn't say how he based that attribution.

Not to pretend I know anything about artifacts, but I did some quick googling, and Orient Fishtail seems to fit _except_ for two outliers: 1) Virginia is at the extreme edge of distribution, and 2) at about 119mm in length, the point in question exceeds the 45 to 82mm size range, even more if the base was broken off. I estimated the length based on the penny in photo.  I suppose new finds can change the previously accepted parameters, but this one won't without its base.

oh yeah, that's a lot bigger than I thought it was looking at the first pic. And it's not as "finished" as  I thought it was.
Definitely puts it out of the Orient Fishtail range, and of course it is not a Clovis.
It could be a preform or blank and was never finished, so the base was never there to begin with, but either way you still can't type it without the base. Even if it was a Guilford they wouldn't leave the base unfinished like that unless the whole blade was unfinished. And right above the base, on either side, there is the slightest of indentation that could be where the shoulders were and that would indicate the bottom snapped off and is totally missing.

I agree with Dad, about all you can say is a range, and Early to Mid Archaic looks right.